I also would like to be able to turn off the averaging on the difficulty.

Here is the case in point.  PGN goes through a retarget every 2016 blocks.  Because of it's net hash rate changes, that means that difficulty will go from 1640 to 450 from one block to the next.  As a result the block time will change from up to 10 mins to .2 mins.  Which means that when the diff drops to 451, the profitability goes through the roof.  But when that happened last night.  A miner using this external program would never switch to the high profitability of PGN because the network difficulty was only changing by some very small value at each update.  I could force this to happen by starting and stopping the external program.

A command line switch to force live updates, or better a JSON option in the config.json file should be added to enable/disable this feature per coin.