The main problem is that there's basically no communication at all from the devs - the znodes were introduced with several changes to the mining consensus:
Mandatory payments to the nodes directly from the pool became necessary where the protocol would reject blocks without those payments immediately.
Usually you introduce such protocol changes to the protocol but don't enforce them at first so every (pool) can make sure they meet the specs and get it running and also do some testing if the transition etc works fine and then you enforce those payments.