Man, don't even get me started on Kano.  The rudeness isn't an issue for me, I'm rude too.  The deleting posts is regrettable but whatever, it's a self moderated thread, everyone should know it's an echo chamber the moment they see that.

The issue for me is Kano eating up peoples 'dust' from mining ramp up time and pretending it's a negligible amount.  It's not.  And even if it was, it's still other peoples money and he should pay it out to them.  But if you ask him about it, even very politely, like you said, it's like a 12 y/o jumped on the keyboard and had a hissy fit as a response.  "I'll pay that dust out when hell freezes over!" - Seriously, that's a quote, can't be bothered to dig up the link but that's basically exactly what he said.  Three years now he's been stacking up peoples 'dust' and it's well over $75k USD by now.

I think the non-payment of 'dust' and other people who have gotten burned with Kano's pool in other ways (didn't setup their account right, didn't notice until it was already several hundred (or thousand?) USD worth mined, never made whole by Kano, who just kept it and laughed at them about it) are all the reason anyone needs to avoid his crappy pool like the plague.

I would recommend ckPool instead.  Everyone's super nice, there are no fees, no pool wallets, only downsides are it's still very small in size and one time there was a snafu with the first mined block and that unfortunately resulted in no one getting paid for it.  Oh well, that's how beta's go.  I can personally confirm that payments are made now, instantly the moment block is mined, even for amounts that would be 'dust' in Kano's pool.

Good luck and happy mining!