Err, what? p2pool network for VTC is quite alive and works perfectly well, I can't see any signs of destruction

And I can't see any problem with having three parallel pools. If this is too complicated for you, just stick with the first well known p2pool and leave the other two pools to miners (like me...) who prefer to mine with lower share difficulty.

At the moment the first pool alone has about 870 MH/s which is roughly 12% of the total VTC network hashrate. I don't know any other coin where p2pool gets such a big piece of the cake. So no signs of dying out, sorry.

Edit: If you want to know how not to handle things, just look at LTC: They're well aware of the problem with too high share difficulty and resulting huge variance for smaller/normal miners. All they did is setting up a page which tells you to stay away from p2pool if you're not big enough. Very clever solution, so LTC p2pool get about 1% of the total LTC hashrate...