I have read that P2P profits long term are greater, does this still hold true?
Nobody can answer that, since it depends so much on luck and other factors. With the luck taking a very long time to average out, so the other factors a are really hard to measure. Over the past few months p2pool has had fairly bad luck. Very recently luck has been a little better. The future, nobody knows.
However, I will say that the expected value of the p2pool payout method (if set to zero fees) is higher than the expected value of the eligius payout method for finite time. Maybe that is important to you.
I'm not sure that last statement about being higher payout than Eligius is accurate. You can put 0% donation into both, both pay transaction fees, and Eligius pays merged mining on NMC. Yes you can merge mine in p2pool, but you are solo merged mining, which is almost the same as solo mining BTC.
And when you throw in increasing variance with p2pool, I definitely think Eligius comes out ahead (which is why I'm there, not on p2pool).
M