"And after all - for majority of us the lost amount is rather insignificant - the daily income would be affected by a single-digit percentage. So - let's stop whining about it."
Except that I had the exact same thing happen to me in the next block, too - meaning that I now distrust the reward calculations being made. Even if the amounts being discussed are trivial, what is the point of mining at all if you aren't being paid fairly for the work you do?
I like Slush's pool, but have to consider moving over to a different pool if the problems here can't be resolved. I don't mine for the money, I do it for the score and the BTC mined is how the score is kept.
I second that - I like slush's pool because it is more exciting then others. The way rewards are computed per found block makes it feels more like a game (oh how many blocks we found today!?!?!) whereas in other pools (PPS, even shifts PPLNS) it feels more like repetitive water drops in terms of earnings - the outcome is more or less pre-determined for a day with your computational power.
But fluctuations are really wild at times here and we need confidence that the pool rewards are computed correctly and honestly.
I think what happened on this block is just a combination of really bad timing and the reward computation algorithm. But if so maybe an algorithm needs a closer look. After all we don't want a "hop-resistant" algorithm to drive people out of the pool due to loss of confidence.