Part of the answer is that the last block (114451) took over an hour to solve.  

I have been noticing that as soon as the difficulty gets around 145000 or higher it gets very difficult to solve a block and it seems out of proportion to what I would expect. It also takes long time for the difficulty to adjust down.  I assume because the time between blocks is too long.   No one is going to make any money if the coin can't be mined.

Can the devs investigate this?

EDIT: the net hash rate dropped to 5.88 once the block was found. So much for conspiracy theories....