I wish I could improve my connection to pool somehow. On short-medium rounds I get adequate rewards, but on very very short ones, which should give that most "saisfactory feeling" it usually sucks for me. (18191 0:00:47 106938 2 0.00045790 = only 2 shares instead of 6-9).
In all other cases, and especially long rounds - my speed / pool speed *25 reward seems fine to me.
Also - does that hopping thing still exist? Or it's a problem of the past?
Pool hopping exists, but it's a gamble on slush. You would have to be trying to predict how much longer the block will take and get yourself in long enough before the end to get a sufficiently high score, and you would need to be operating under the assumption that whichever pool you hop from isn't going to have a short block just as you hopped out or you just jumped away from a nice short block. I'm content staying in one place, letting my pc mine away whenever I'm not playing games, although I'm off all day today and all these short blocks are making me not want to start up a game lol