It's not broken, it's using vardiff, which starts out at a high difficulty for higher hashrate users. If you're a lower hashrate user, as in this case, it will take a few minutes to ratchet the difficulty down, then it will show accepted shares every 10 seconds or so, +/- 30 seconds.
And at any rate, you can't judge a pool's effectiveness by the rate of accepteds CGminer shows without factoring in the share difficulty, as the pool shares will be multiplied by the difficulty factor. That means that even when the difficulty is high initially, you're solving and getting more difficult shares accepted, which count more than quicker, lower difficulty shares--the total amount of work done is the same, and therefore the amount of coins you will earn is the same.
Not sure if I can follow you. I just know, I got > 1k on the other pool within 5 minutes and ~600 on poolofpools after 15min or so.
Anyway, at this diff it's time for soloing

Its definitely a decent time for solo mining with diff at .5... But if you don't want to set that up, there are plenty of good pools. I went ahead and turned our starting diff down to 64 from 256, and lowered the re-check time from 2 minutes to 90 seconds. I initially set it a little high to make sure we could cope with launch-day load, and in case I had to restart stratum. This should update should help a lot for lower hashrate miners. I.e. a worker that connects with 400 kh will now be at the perfect diff, and 200 kh will only have to be adjusted down once vs 3 times before.
tl;dr: I apologize, smaller workers are welcome we weren't very welcoming before tho, I hadn't done all the math to see how bad it actually was.
Thanks for your explanation. This was exactly what I observered - diff went down to 128 after couple of minutes. But even the top miner on your pool with ~2MH seemed not as successfull as equal miners on another pool.
However, I will give it another try once difficulty passes 2 or 3.