The one apollo at 5EH I've seen the photos and it's got over 150 big hitter miners up to over 300 miners on it.  No reason to connect to ckpool web server.  Your apollo is a ckpool.  A node you control, not someone else. One less hand in the pass.  You can connect over 900 miners to it if you want to.

As for pool hashing It's a great idea if you get over 5EH for many weeks.  But once that block is hit only the apollo gets it, its not distributed and the moment one miner doesn't play ball the next group mining will have fewer miners.  There is no guarantee all will participate and when you lose miners you lose hash power.

I had  futurebit moonlanders running 90GH.  It ran for years and it did hit a best share of 1.6 Trillion.  Difficulty was 25 Trillion.  So this is all possible.  Miners have to run to discover a better best share.  This is a lottery.  You may never hit or your could hit the jackpot tomorrow.  You need reliable miners and a reliable node that will successfully submit a block.  I now trust the apollo will do that when it hits.  Imagine if your connected to a pool not in your control and  your miner hits but the pool sight is down and doesn't report the found block.