Unrelated, less technical question: several people have requested features that are just not feasible at pool level for many reasons that you have already explained (hashrate drop notifications, for example). However these features seem not that complicated to implement for third parties or miners themselves, by running a watcher monitoring workers through the API. Are you aware of already existing OSS code or services (free/tips-based or commercial)? Would it stress the API too much if many miners started doing so? If not, maybe I'll feel like writing some basic code tonight...
There is a service somebody was starting where you could enter your pool API key and they would send you notices if your hash rate dropped below a defined amount. I can not recall it at this time.
Bitcoinium has that option..