My question now going forward (for everyone, not specifically Friedcat), for an company like this, is there any advantage to using the pools at all?
Solo mining provides
1) No operator fees
2) All transaction fees (which have been consistently rising since Bitcoin started)
3) Less risk from pool owner trust
4) Less risk from pool downtime and DDOS attacks
At a cost of
1) More variance (who cares when you have significant hash power)
You've summed it up pretty well. With this proportion of the network hashrate variation really isn't a problem. Who cares if we don't find a block for 6 hours, then find 5 within 5 minutes, it'll all go into the weekly dividend anyway.