I have found 70 shares now, 7 orphan and 5 dead, for stale rate of 17.1% (10-28% interval). Pool stale rate is 20.4% now, so efficiency is 104% (90-113% interval).
One thing I remembered was that I have downclocked my CPU to 1.2 GHz from the default clock rate of 2.5 GHz or so to save a little CPU. That might affect things a bit. I might check that at some point.
bitcoind getblocklatency is 0.93 seconds now, so it is much better than the 30 seconds earlier. I think the CPU frequency affects this latency the most, and was likely the reason my latency was 30s with the old bitcoind version.
I've found that the biggest influencer on latency has been the txfee settings. Some people might consider 0.9s latency as still quite high so it might worth trying to tune your txfee settings and see if it comes down even further.
Try setting them to 0.0002 and see if that helps you and then decide if you want to lower it to include more transactions for more fees.