But a lot of cryptonight miners are just clones of existing reference algorithms to my eyes, eg blake256, keccak etc. Most of the innovation is around usability and deployment rather than optimising of mining algorithm to improve performance.

Personally I'm not bothered about logging, monitoring etc, I'd rather have a 10% faster miner or one that uses 16gb on a vega frontier. I turn the monitoring off, the only thing I look at a couple of times a day is the pool but each to their own.