Are profit switch pools causing harm to our alternate crypto currencies?

If you keep an eye on coinwarz, every few minutes you'll see the difficulty of one coin (SPT, GDC typically) rise and rise very quickly (and it's profitability drop). This effect will then swap coin.

Is this being caused by profit switch pools (hasco.ws and middlecoin for example)? Or is something else at play? Middlecoin for example reports 2498 MH\s of power. That's huge. More than the entire networks of some coins.

I feel it practically kills solo mining and even the majority of dedicated pools, as well as potentially making an alt vulnerable to various attacks. Anybody have any thoughts?