Yep, that and p2pool were the way to go. And given that other pools "vanished" along the way *grumble* with coin balances it was nice to get paid for work done.
Miss it, slush is a fine pool, just isn't quite the same.
Slush skips block transaction verification and mines empty blocks.
As for coinbase payout: you still have to wait the full 101 confirms (over 16hrs) - a pool that sends the payout at that point may only add a few more confirms (less than an hour) or even only one confirm (average 10 minutes)
But ... some new miners don't support it since it's a MUCH bigger coinbase transaction
obviously that also means a much larger work size being sent from the pool to the miner.
Block distribution is now highly optimised - but it can never optimise the coinbase transaction since it will ALWAYS be an unknown transaction that needs to be sent with the block header, thus if you make it large, you're slowing down the block distribution.
Also, as is very well known, this pool had a very high orphan rate - around 3% compared to around 1% for most pools back then.
The wait was never a big deal, but I've never thought about the block header, you are absolutely correct. Anyway it was nice to have the mining symbol in your core wallet, still own some unspent coinbase inputs