I pay 3% at BTC Guild. I get paid for orphans, I get merged mining with NMC (impossible on p2pool solo), extremely low variance, 0.2% stales, and transaction fees.
You're going to have a hard time convincing me p2pool is better than that.
M
I don't want to convince you, because we value the benefit of mining differently.
Especially the decentralization and variance part.
I'm not following how you value increased variance. Most people consider variance to be a bad thing.
Decentralization I can understand and agree with. If I had the hashpower so that the current almost 1 million share difficulty didn't cause huge variance (or p2pool was changed so share difficulty didn't effectively lock out low end miners), and I could run p2pool locally, I would be a p2pool miner (again) as well. Using a public node defeats the whole purpose of decentralization.
M