of course this difference is not huge but in the end it makes some $. only advantage of big pools was that i did not have to check and restart my miners every week. in p2pool i had to check all the time how my miners were working, restart them or even change the node (there are not many stabile nodes out there - sad but truth).
I don't know Acejam, but he runs a load balancing cluster of p2pool nodes here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=422242.0