Would it ever be possible to make pools of some kind with Nxt?
That would be quite easy in fact. We could do it right now.
Just pool all NXT of those looking to pool theirs into one account that is always connected. It would be nice to have deposits and withdrawals automated, of course, but that's just a little web coding.
shouldnt my transaction propagate across the whole network causing it to get included on real chains and orphan chains alike?
That's what I would assume, too. Except when there's a complete disjoint split, where one half doesn't talk at all with the other half.