At this point in time whatever we do we need to stop removing/making it difficult for people to stay mining with us in one particular pool - it is affecting the hashrate and perception of the stability of the coin at the moment. We've got a lot going for us but we need to at least get back to the initial 300MH/s rather than these fluctuations.
If we can stabilise at that rate again then I will actively push and promote to appear on an exchange or two - as this will then take us to the next necessary level to prevent us from floundering where we are now. We're being as active and transparent as we can be, moreso than coins around us with 10x the hash-rate. Whatever we're missing - we need to change it to get back to where we were yesterday.
I believe that one of the issues is that having a few of the miners with the highest hash rate on the same pool sets the pool to be attractive or not because you get new blocks more often. I was mining on a smaller pool almost alone and was really getting very low income and moved to valid-error. I'll switch back again to another one (for the coin sake) knowing that my income will be greatly reduced.
If some of the high rate hashers could balance themselves between 2 or 3 pools would be the best. Unfortunately they are all as anonymous.
Big or small, i think all miners are looking at the results and making the same decision you did, do go back to valid-error where blocks are found in avg. 115% of shares. On the smaller pools that number is upwards of 300%. I'm not sure what to make of those numbers but all I know is, I too received a lot less coin from the small pools than on the large one.
I'm moved over to a smaller pool again, will let it run a while and check the results. Frankly If I'm still only getting a fraction of what earned with valid-error, sorry but I'm not going to throw my hashpower away and waste potential income. That's the same decision I think most of us would make?
We just really need to get the net hashrate up again. Hoping the other crap coins will die away soon and people will come here.