Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions, it is much appreciated.
I'm going with Blazepool and Blockmasters with "build larger shares" on both and "use mine coin" on Blockmasters. I'm no using the "actual price instead of estimates" yet, but we'll run with this for a day or so and see what it is like tomorrow. Hopefully things look better. I really want to use your program as you are a very responsive dev and seem to be genuinely interested in helping. Thank you.
I genuinely want to see all users of the software benefit from using it and it is unfortunate that it has taken awhile to find the optimal configuration for your rig. Maybe in the future and based on ongoing feedback from users, it will be easier to define more general guidelines for new users based on hardware configurations and user preferences.
Another suggestion is that if you are using Z-Enemy miner as the preferred miner for any of the algorithms it supports, you may want to follow the developer's recommendations for intensity settings found here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3378390.0 Some of the miner's default settings are not the recommended values. If you change the intensity settings for a preferred miner, you may want to consider locking that miner if you are using the Change Preferred Miners Automatically advanced configuration setting.
In regards to BlockMasters, you may want to read this post
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4101412.0 to see what others have been saying about their price estimates. I don't agree with everything being said in that thread, but I have found that the actual prices are closer to my expectations than some of the current estimates.