Also, coins are profitable mostly due to a drop in difficulty, not a spike in price.
Yes but since when difficulty drops for a particular coin everyone runs to mine it, multi-pools first... and they dump it as soon as it is mined... guess what happens to its price.
Yes, and other multipools also have to wait for the coins to mature too.
well I do believe that price should be factored in. I mean if you mine a million doges in like say an 1hr due to low difficulty but the btc price of it is only .003 and at the same time ltc price in btc is like 0.2 it doesn't make sense in mining doges at that time. Thats just my opinion I maybe wrong but price must have been factored in or else this formula becomes useless. Why not just mine a dieing coin it will have the lowest difficulty and claim that you made alot of money even though you cant exchange it...
Of course price is also factored in... That's part of what "profitability" means, you know.