I find it fascinating how even while being split in two, with roughly ~115GH/s in the group using the new version and ~90GH/s in the group using the old version (if I'm reading things correctly and the Pool GH/s stat counts only verified shares of each fragment), that the p2pool is still correctly solving blocks and doling out rewards (to those that are in the fragment that actually solved the block, of course).

Could fragmentation actually be a good thing in the long run? Maybe the protocol could try to optimally split nodes by hashing capacity or locality? To how many GH/s can p2pool scale before bandwidth starts becoming an issue? Could rewards somehow get shared across these fragments, forming a sort of recursive tree structure? I'm just asking because 10 second rounds doesn't give the network much time to propagate the solved blocks to every node, and it seems possible that with many more miners in the pool there would be a lot of losses due to orphaned blocks.