The average reward will even out over the long run, but that also means you will need to stick to that one pool over an extended period in order to reap the expected reward.
That's wrong. You could mine in a different score-based fair pool every day, and your total rewards will still converge to the average.
That still defeats the point by restricting the miner to a small number of pools, which would have to be similar in nature, at least for the fee system. Good luck with that.
They don't have to be similar in nature. As long as the miner makes sure to only mine in pools were he doesn't lose to pool-hopping, his reward will converge to the average.
proportionate pools do not have the intermittent issue
That's wrong. Even setting aside the hopping issue, proportional pools have higher variance than a PPLNS pool with the default parameters. So if PPLNS is bad for intermittent miners, so is proportional.
I have already mentioned that proportional pools have higher variance than others, in the second line of the very paragraph you are talking about.
This doesn't make the quoted sentence any less wrong. The intermittent issue either exists in both PPLNS and proportional or in neither (and if it's neither, remove PPLNS from "...score-based and PPLNS pools require special consideration on your part").
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.
Scores decay exponentially if the miner is disconnected. How is that not punishing the disconnection?
The score for previous shares decays exponentially whether the miner disconnects or not. Remaining connected doesn't stop the decay, it just replenishes the score with the score of the new shares.
I'm not completely sure if we're still discussing in good faith. If I'm not welcome I'll leave, no hurt feelings.