The satisfaction of seeing a reward, even small, is what makes mining worth while. With a share difficulty now at 888k, your odds of getting a share with 12gh/s is very very low.
If you want steady, although small income, point it to a large pool like BTCGuild.
There is no reason to assume that the satisfaction of seeing a $2/day reward is greater than the satisfaction of seeing a reward of $5 or $10 every few days. This is hardly solo mining where you are trying to get very lucky and score $20K but most will never get anything (although I'd add that many very small miners might well enjoy that too -- after all lots and lots of people play the lottery and unlike mining the vig on that is atrocious). Every miner with say 12 GH on p2pool will get fairly consistent rewards every week at least, just not every day.
I will say this though, the cost of running a full bitcoin node and p2pool node in terms of bandwidth and effort are significant. If you are only pulling own a few dollars per day it probably isn't worth it.