And please let off with the "Same Value in the Long Term" argument. While perfectly valid in statistical terms, it has little relevance to the intermittent miner since it's far more important to know how much reward he/she can expect to earn for a given period of mining.
Then say
that. Don't say they punish people. A little bit of wording can go a long way.
Also note my other points above.
Do you have a thread where you talk about possible far future scenarios for mining? Both the topics of possible reward systems and number/sizes of pools would make for interesting discussion.
No coherent thread, but here's a short version of my vision: There will be several low-fee PPS pools, acting as a proxy to a p2pool as a backend. There will be many getwork servers, and people will freely mix-and-match their pool and getwork server(s). Oblivious shares will be used to prevent block withholding. Larger miners will skip the PPS pool and participate directly in the p2pool.