To everyone worrying - you can still use 1.4.4a for legacy stratum protocol pools. So far I haven't noticed that 1.5.x is significantly faster. It seems a teensy tiny bit faster in equihash, but it's a wash for neoscrypt and lyra2v2. So just keep using 1.4.4a if you don't want to mine at nicehash.

Also, if you already have mining scripts that use multiple miners, it shouldn't be too hard to add in the new excavator as a totally new miner. Say, call the old one "excavator-classic" or call the new one "excavator-nhmp" or something. That's what I did.

To the excavator devs:

question: is there any chance of the new nicehash mining protocol being documented or open-sourced in some way so other software devs could implement support for it in their miners? Setting aside dstm -- which it sounds like you're working on overtaking anyway -- ethminer, claymore, xmrig and xmrig-nvidia for example are all still significantly faster than excavator, and if they could support nhmp I bet it'd be a net positive for Nicehash.