Can someone help explain for a newbie - If Dedicated has around 800 workers and is finding most of the blocks in that pool, why would we want to move to a smaller pool finding less blocks... I would think that by being on the bigger pool and finding most of the blocks, we may not get as many shares but at least we would get _some_ shares from most of the blocks... Or I am thinking about this from the wrong angle?
It doesn't work like that - you get paid exactly the same on any (honest) pool - your variance will be lower on a big pool because it's less likely they go hours without hitting a block, but on the other hand, does a few hours matter much??? Is your view that short term???
OTOH, if you join the biggest pool, you basically attack the blockchain - if someone has over 50% of nethash (in fact, more accurately, if they have anywhere near 50%, so even 30% is bad) then the coin is fundamentally untrustworthy at that point - no-one can know without forensically analysing the blockchain that bad stuff hasn't been pulled off - that is terrible for the value of any coins you mine.
That's not ENTIRELY true. A big pool will improve variance which is VERY important at low difficulties. Say you're on a small pool or hell solo mining, and you don't get a block for the first 3 hours. You just blew your low difficulty period while the large pool gives out blocks every 10 minutes while mining low difficulty. If the coin was stable, sure it'd be the same but a brand new coin with almost no difficulty, variance plays a big role.