the fact you impose arbitrary standards on this pool also seems to have glossed by your attention.
I'm failing to see how it's arbitrary to say that the vast majority of pools charge 1% or less. It's quite objective, and in no part arbitrary.
Lets use an analogy then. You can go to any number of online financial brokerages (Etrade and the like) and pay $10 a trade. You can go to a financial advisor to do the same thing and provide you some advice while he's at it for $25 a trade. When you're trading $5000 worth of securities at a time, it seems like a pittance either way, but the latter is still a LOT more expensive, relatively speaking.