Quick question, now it seems the blocks are moving, but still 50 blocks between 79257 and 79307 nearly 9 hours.
50 blocks should take just under 1 hour, or is it not aiming to be 70 seconds per block anymore?
It's odd, that... it was obviously happening before the fork too, but in that case, it was running on the same code which had previously hit the 70 sec time quite consistently.
I was going to comment on this as well; the difficulty spikes have gotten better (doesn't go from 0.1 to 20) but still not as smooth as it should be.
There should be NO difficulty spike; good coins change difficulty every block and the difficulty change is not that much, like no more than 1-2% difficulty change either way based on the last block.
That way you can get smooth and predictable mining all the way through.