Today Awesome Miner is not saving the profit information from these coin statistics sources, it only uses the API's provided by them to get current profit (configurable to 24h actual profit in the next release).
Yes, I'm aware that this data was only a current statistic. We had talked about this a few weeks ago where I made the suggestion to have a small database, caching this information to have AM build it's own moving average for display and use in the logic of profit-switching, if the user chooses that method. I only brought it up again, because I want people to understand what these figures represent. I think a 24 hour or longer moving average would be a really neat feature to have, and I'm eager to play with it to see if my theories hold true in real life.
I had also emailed you a few months ago about something similar for the temperatures and hashrate graphs on the Dashboard tab, if they or other statistics were cached in a database for analysis, probably in a small database. You mentioned that AM wasn't doing this currently, which is fine. I realize adding a database of some of these values might be a significant feature to add, but it might be good to expose some of this data to the user to make some deeper analysis of their miners if they choose to do so. I think it would be a cool feature to add that would make Awesome Miner stand out, especially for your larger miner customers who have the bandwidth to do this kind of analysis (or us number nerds!) And of course, I would expect this feature to only be available in a higher cost edition of AM. No pressure from me... I'm just trying to help with some ideas on how to make AM better, and more effective for users.
There's already a ton of features I haven't gotten around to testing like the the Profit Factors like you mention below.
In the future it should probably be some improvement to the Performance history feature that is quite limited today. I fully agree that the amount of information Awesome Miner should be able to collect is large, and that very interesting analysis could be applied to this data. These ideas makes perfect sense.
I've also been thinking about if this entire deep analysis field could be another kind of application, possibly developed by someone else, in the future. Awesome Miner do provide API's that can be used to extract a lot of information. An external application could collect a lot of data based on that and do more advanced analysis and processing on it.
If you only select Nicehash, Zpool and MPH for the profit switcher, then the information from WhatToMine and Coins tab isn't used. However, if you add a custom pool or pools, it may be a single coin pool for Dash or Signatum. For these single coin pools, the profit information from WhatToMine is used - which is also what you see on the Coins tab. If for example Signatum is more profitable than what Nicehash and the others have, the profit switcher will go for Signatum. So the profit switcher is already comparing single coin pools (WhatToMine statistics) with the multipools (Nicehash, ... statistics).
For a given Profit switching profile, you can compare the Profit values in the Coins tab and the Online services tab.
That's what I assumed was going on under the hood, but I'm glad you clarified it here. I think the more exposure the user has to some of the logic or where AM is using what statistics where is helpful to the user to understand how to setup AM so that it works for their situation. It's already very very flexible in many different scenarios, but that flexibility comes at a learning curve cost for the end user.
Would it be possible to add the Whattomine statistics to the Online Services tab? If I'm reading your quote above correctly, AM will use both tabs for profit switching if I had selected the NH and custom pool profit, but it might be confusing to the user how AM uses those two tabs differently. Or at the very least some labels on the tabs (Coins and Online Services) so that the user understands how those two sets of data are used by AM.
I have been getting requests about combining the tabs for Coins and Online services. From a profit presentation point of view, it makes sense to combine them, because that's exactly what the profit switcher is doing. If you have Signatum on top at $12 on the Coins tab and Nicehash X11 on top at $11 on the Online services tab, the profit switcher will go for Signatum - if you have that as a custom pool to the profit switcher. So from a profit number point of view, combining makes sense.
Then we have the other aspect, and that is what kind of information to present about individual coins and about pools like Nicehash. For coins you have much more data and exchange rates and so on, and also the option to edit the coin properties. Combining this together with something like Nicehash could look strange. I'm not saying that these two tabs will be separate for all future, just that there are both benefints and drawbacks with both solutions.
I think the fact that Nicehash and Zpool obscure the actual coin you are mining would be a challenge, as you mention. But in the end, the user just wants to make sure his miner is mining the most profitable coin or algorithm.