I guess more people would try p2pool if it worked with most miners (like cgminer or poclbm).
+1 agreed, it should be compatible, not force changes to all miners
I hadn't tested cgminer before, working on it now. It doesn't seem to have the problems other miners have with long polling, but has something else causing quite a few stales ... maybe it can be fixed with a command line option.
Normal poclbm and DiabloMiner have a delay in long polling requests that can't be worked around - the creator made some assumptions about how work distribution would work ... But they still work, they just have a high percentage of stales.
Phoenix did the same thing (assumptions that can't be worked around), but they much more significantly hurt the stale ratio.