Hi - Little off topic so I apologise now. I think your test of Hashcows was probably a little unfortunate in terms of timing. They did suffer massively from their hack and have taken longer than most people expected, and they predicted, to get back on track. In the last week they have definitely moved forward and are showing good returns from their strategy. I would recommend you give them a few more weeks and perhaps take another look.
I believe that there are 3 main players now in this field.
Middlecoin - are by far the largest, give consistent, strong, returns, but have high fees, no transparency and such a ridiculous high difficulty that they are only practical with high end rigs.
Wafflepool - (in my opinion) have the best load-balancing / switching success, fantastic development rate, returns that are improving fast and the best reporting of stats that I've seen.
Hashcows - have recently adopted an aggressive approach to new coins, offer the possibility of keeping coins on an individual basis, but still need to fix many aspects of their website as the stats just plain don't work properly right now.
From this information I have decided to adopt the following strategy as my preferred solution.
I have 50% of my hashing on Wafflepool, with Hashcows set as the backup & 50% on Hashcows with Wafflepool set as my backup. I won't entertain Middlecoin as I have some older graphics cards in my collection that are just at a major disadvantage there.
You may be right, and others have pointed me to recent high returns at cows. I do plan to test again, but I've decided to wait until they resolve the constant disconnects after switching a coin. The work-around options they've given are unacceptable in my case. I am not downgrading from 3.7.2. I use a pre-built mining distro because I it takes less than 60 seconds to load the OS to USB and have a rig boot straight to mining. I'm also not setting my expiry and scan times to ridiculously low levels as they would make it impossible to use middlecoin as a backup. When they get that fixed, I'll be able to test again. Until then the results would be skewed and I would be losing hashrate.
Pretty much in agreement about everything else you've said, although I do have 3 7850's doing very well on Middle. Very stable 1MH rate, so I'm using it as my baseline testing against waffle. Also, the cows also have to resolve their reject rate. It's absolutely pathetic, and was greater than 15% on average when they were just mining cryptsy based coins. It appears to have gotten worse.