I'm happy to help. PGBench has a lot of potential to help miners get the most hash rate and efficiency out of their existing hardware. In this bear market, power usage and efficiency is almost as important as raw mining speed, so time spent tuning GPUs is a good investment.

I limit my pools to three or four because I prefer to have payouts at least once a week and I do not have a large number of GPUs.  If you have too many pools enabled, it can take a long time to reach the minimum payout amount for any single pool. Of course, a user's preferred number of pools depends on their hardware and payout preferences.  I try not to make specific pool recommendations because a user's choice of pool should depend on their proximity to the pool servers, the algorithms/coins they prefer to mine and their hardware.  For example, a user with only one or two GPUs is usually better off mining a lower volume pool because the difficulty assigned by the pool tends to be lower and their share of the rewards higher.  Trying to mine an overworked port usually hurts profitability regardless of what the estimates are - which is why I included the Exclude High Volume Ports setting for most pools.

However, one suggestion is to try to mix pools with different levels of mining activity (amount of workers, total hash rate per port, etc).  Larger pools with more miners can more quickly earn rewards for more popular coins that have higher difficulties - but you will get smaller portions of those returns and fewer shares for your hashing power.  Pools with less mining activity tend to payout bigger shares for less popular coins.  How profitable those coins are depends on the exchange rates, but it is a good diversification strategy. There will be times when the smaller pool will provide better earnings for the same algorithm as the larger pool due to different assortment of coins they mine. Of course, the issue with smaller pools is that you could find yourself being the only miner on a port - which is no better than solo mining and will often delay earnings.  So I recommend enabling the Exclude Low Volume Ports setting on the pools that support it to prevent mining on any port where you will provide a significant share of the hash rate. Even bigger pools such as Blazepool can have ports (ex: Bitcore) that can have few miners.

Also, some miners including myself, have noticed that x16r profitability has dropped on the auto-exchange pools as more miners focus on that one algorithm. An interesting strategy is to disable x16r on all the auto-exchange pools that you use except for NiceHash since their marketplace provides more consistent earnings that are not affected by share percentages and the frequency at which the pool finds new blocks. It provides a good backstop when the other algorithms on the auto-exchange pools are not as profitable.