Nice, 2 more blocks last night while I was asleep ... I got one of them

(my first block in MANY months)
Edit: ... and I've spent some time now (since that post) working out why my block sux.
It is only 16k and only had 28 txn in it.
My bitcoind (default 0.8.3 settings for txns etc except: paytxfee=0.0005) on the other hand at the time had 1854 in it's mempool:
2013-07-25 16:25:43 CTxMemPool::accept() : accepted 7b1f0fd72e281abdb9b6724aa839b872550a3e7ff8de395dfbe20cd92777d4ae (poolsz 1854)
2013-07-25 16:25:43 ThreadRPCServer method=submitblock
.
.
2013-07-25 16:25:44 SetBestChain: new best=000000000000006e312482364ffc008b8fabad506fefde343a1acfc1f64ae982 height=248394 log2_work=70.874866 tx=21101483 date=2013-07-25 16:24:32 progress=0.999995
2013-07-25 16:25:44 ProcessBlock: ACCEPTED
.
.
2013-07-25 16:25:44 CTxMemPool::accept() : accepted c75dd649944be1e262c3c82fda612e29c1631b74b7563f0142e28486623c2217 (poolsz 1828)
... anyone care to explain that before I switch over to some other pool ... it really does look like it's p2pool itself that decided to produce that crap block ... unless I've misunderstood somewhere ... or are there hidden options in p2pool that I need to fix and the default settings suck?