Is there a projected point where payout will equal what is expected for mining solo, is that a particular hash/sec rate? At this point it seems 1/4 of what difficulty is (and what one can get on slush's pool, even with the 2% fee)
Slush bases his pool speed off of the speed of getwork requests being made (as far as I can tell) and we base ours off of the speed of shares being submitted, so it's difficult to say exactly when we would be "equal" to the speed of slush's pool.
Our pool has been open to the public for ~6 days now, so I imagine it will be awhile before we can get up to a comparable speed, but no amount of wizardry, rune reading or asking my crystal ball will tell me for sure.
Stick with it, and it will get better.