Sorry to go back to the P2Pool topic...
More thread hijacking!
Is P2Pool worth it?
Over the long run, yes. But "smaller" miners will experience extremely high variance.
I've been mining nastyfans p2pool for about 36 hours, but rarely see my BTC address on p2pool.info active client list.
This is what I mean by "high variance." While you are on the active payout list, if P2Pool finds a block, you'll get paid--much more than traditional pools. But you if you are not on the list, you won't get paid.
Reading some wiki info about P2Pool, I'm guessing most of my shares are being discarded and I rarely submit a share with a high enough difficulty to be included in the network. Does that sound right?
This is exactly correct.
Would it be better to point to my gear to a traditional miner pool?
It's up to you. Most would leave as the variance would be too high (a long time before a payout).