The reason Wafflepool's return was higher lately is (I think) because they jumped on ghash.io's "1.25x" bandwagon. That wil end tomorrow around midday.
Not the case. PoolWaffle did build a stratum proxy and was testing proxying 25% of the pool when GHash implemented the tiered reward scheme. However,
WafflePool stopped mining at GHash as soon as they posted info about the 1.25x bonus.
The reason WafflePool's rates are higher now is probably: luck, or, the new custom stratum server that PoolWaffle built is really doing it's job.
Time will tell.
Just a lol from me in that "classically" in cryptoworld means over the past couple of weeks

Classically, in this sense, would mean "before now". CM's BTC/MH rate has always been inflated because of reject rate skew. WafflePool has had a consistent <1% reject rate for almost all users over it's life as a pool - even if you set your intensity through the roof (say, 23). This is because WP only considered shares stale if they were 2 blocks behind, not just 1. Under the new switcher scheme, shares are rejected in a different way, and this encourages more reasonable tuning settings to maintain a ~2% reject rate (so far in my tests).
Well, that's not true.
Waffle admin said that he is pointing part of pools hashrate directly to ghash until the promotion end, cause even with 1.25 it is better.