Have you actually gone back and looked at the intro, faq, getting started, and signup pages for major pools?
Maybe if you did you would realize your perception and reality aren't the same thing.
From the two largest non merged mining pools in existence:
deepbit
Pay per share: 0.00002663771002209 BTC per every submitted share
Admittedly they also have a proportional pool to which they pay out for each block less 3%. As I stated earlier, if they mine Namecoin blocks with this hashing power and keep all of the namecoins this is dishonest.btc guild
BTC Guild pays out proportionally. When a round ends your payout is determined simply:
50 BTC * (Your Shares this round / Total Shares this round)
Pools can't have their cake and eat it too. They can't use language which indicates a "fair split" and then perform an unfair split.
I completely agree and have never said otherwise. If a pool says that it is giving you a "fair split" and then gives you an "unfair split" then they are cheating or incompetent (my problem with some of the proportional pools). If they simply imply that the deal is fair but, when read carefully, it is not specifically state to be fair then it is dishonest or incompetent in my opinion (just like most advertising put out by large companies these days). I'm much more interested in hearing what people think about a pool which explicitly states "We pay x BTC per share you submit" and nothing more. Do you believe that they are guilty of fraud if and only if they use those shares to generate namecoins? Is it really any business of the miner what the pool does with the hashes they have accumulated if there has been no agreement about what can and cannot be done with the hashes?