I'm rather new only having about 3 weeks of experience, I looked over many different pools and I liked the idea of the merged mining. I think I would like to see a few more coins added if they can be, I know many out there are worthless, but then a few years ago bitcoin wasn't worth the paper it was printed on either.
Is this round taking so long due to an increase in difficulty or just bad luck?
For a coin to be added it needs to have the ability to be merge mined added by the coin developer. There aren't many around. Huntercoin and CoiledCoin are the two coins I know of that are merge mineable that the pool current doesn't mine. CoiledCoin has no exchange, interest or maintainer that I'm aware of. Huntercoin could be added. It's a bit of a resource hog so I'd need to do some minor server changes to do that.
The round is taking a long time in terms of elapsed time due to our low hash rate. It's taking a long time in terms of 'number of shares'/CDF due to bad luck. The pool is not near it's longest round ever in terms of CDF or luck. It is currently about 3x difficulty in number of shares done. The pool has 8x difficulty before. Let's hope we don't have that again!