Can't say about ethermine pool but some pools are very profitable, for example spark pool and Nicehash gives miner double profits since two days ago, in early february I used to earn 9$ per day but two days ago it's now 17$ to 19$ but today things are slowly going back to the way they are
I did notice that yes. Ethermine did the same thing for me. My daily profit estimate now is over $200 but it is starting to drop again as the transactions cool off. But it won't last and in the end I still get less per week than I did 2 years ago.