The fact that there was a major tier 1 pool set PRIOR to the official launch should have told you something. You weren't going to compete with the pool on even ground, it's just technically wasn't feasible.
This is not true, a lot of solo mines made a lot of coins. The pool can't operate at 100% at these low difficulties, probably it got like 99% or even more duplicate share submissions during the first thousand blocks. So all these pool miners capacity was wasted, they should have tried there luck with solo mining.