Regarding stratum minimum difficulty, I was wondering about that. Though to some extent having it higher reduces the pool's operating expenses, it also makes it more difficult for low hashrate miners to get shares.

Cryptonight in particular, this actually makes a significant difference- since you can in fact CPU mine this with a reasonable profit, it would be nice if the minimum difficulty was a little bit lower in order to let people trying to get good results.

Was just playing with the tunings on my new Ryzen7 1700x. Its up to 260hash/s, while my old 750ti only gets 130 hash/s on cryptonight. But the stratum difficulty remains so high even after running for quite a while that it seems to only rarely submit shares.