I prefer to mine on small pools, like at Kano, ckpool, or mmpool (before it makes an exit scam, unless the hacker was real? We'll never know). I understand that some people don't want to mine solo, or don't want to wait 1 or 2 years for a block to be solved in PPLNS to receive their funds, but in this case, IMO, they should consider secondary size pools like EMCD for example.
Mining to on small PPLNS is too risky, the variance could be unbearable and results in bankruptcy, it is too late for not to "make pools too large" even those small PPS pools are nothing but a proxy to a larger pool, there is nothing much we can do about it, we would just assume that those pools would make more money playing fair which is almost always the case.