I'm happy with the payout right now, but our only hope is that the difficulty stops rising so fast.  The cost of mining is getting pretty high, so we may not see a whole lot of new miners.  But a lot of existing miners will probably continue investing in hashpower.

I paid in BTC and hope to recover the same amount of BTC.  By investing dollars, you only need a dollar profit, which might be easier if the BTC price rises.  Still, if I had it to do over again, I'd just buy as much BTC as possible and keep it all in storage.