As the average difficulty goes up, pools tend to run mining software that have a predictable reorg policy, in order to minimize the probability that their own blocks get invalidated. That is why we don't see large reorgs these past few years.
Could you elaborate on this? What is a reorg policy, and are there unpredictable variants?
I would have guessed that the decline in reorg frequency and depth is the result of lower miner inter-latency.
And fewer pools. Think back to when there were dozens and dozens of pools as those numbers shrank a couple of block reorg seems to have become a thing of the past.
NOT wanting to put words in NotATether's mouth but what I think he was getting at is that is the way a pool will handle a block they see coming in at the same time they find a block.
I would also think that as
BTC went up in value the existing pools improved their back ends to keep up better instead of using the method of just hoping nothing went wrong.
-Dave