WTF guys, seriously? Hey, why dont we make the payment 0.00001? Would that make you feel any better? If bitcoin would be worth over $1000, I would agree with you, but right now, it doesn't make any sense to me.
+1
Also concur, the only advantage of lowering further is the warm fuzzy of seeing money flow and we don't need a warm fuzzy it's just a known fact that mining has gotten extremely competitive and we're behind the curve at the moment. The mild fringe benefit of lowering payouts would be to causing micropayments on chained accounts initiating the purchase of new hardware but if pyramining has a January plan with a 28nm producer (my guess is Cointerra, but just a guess....) then those payments would serve the pool better waiting for when they would buy that tech. Honestly I wish we had never dropped from 1 BTC payouts due to block chain spam etc.
For smaller deposits it makes more difference. If someone threw in 0.5 BTC and has to wait two years (currently, this should get better) until their deposit is 20% of the way along it's a lot more noticeable than for someone who's got 100 BTC and still gets something out every few days. I would argue (without any concrete evidence) that most deposits are relatively small, 1 BTC or under, and that this will likely be even smaller average deposits in the future with the increased price of bitcoins.
Besides, anything that has to ask for money is going to run on warm fuzzy feelings. If people get enough warm fuzzies to deposit with pyramining then everyone wins and the average hash rate goes up.