Why is the Eligius payout queue so ridiculously obtuse? Other pools don't have this problem.
It is a feature, not a bug. Eligius is the only pool where the coins will show up in your wallet as "mined" and not transferred in. This means that Eligius never holds the funds in a centralized location that can be hacked (well, not "never", but it tries hard to avoid it). Eligius is what it is. It is the fairest pool around. In order to do that, the creators had to get creative.
If you don't like it, mine somewhere else.I don't. And I do.
I'm always curious. What is it that you don't like about Eligius?
From the sound of it, he doesn't like the security of not having to trust the pool op to not run away with your coins since it sounds like he's complaining about the length of the queue. Usually it takes me more than 2 1/2 or 3 days to hit my payout so I get paid within a block or 2. Even if it took longer, I wouldn't mind, especially since it's not like my coin is sitting in a wallet the WK can run off with (I'd trust him to not run off with it, even if it was in a wallet because time and again when the pool goes into failsafe, he makes a manual payout, usually within a couple of days and has never run off with anyone's BTC). I've mined at ghash when I was new, but have connection issues. I've also mined at P2Pool, but don't like the extreme variance that can occur there. The only other pool I've mined at regularly that I would consider an option is BTCGuild, again though, eleuthria is another pool op that I think I can trust 100% with my coin.
Now that I've gone off on a rant, I'd have to guess it's the 2 1/2 to 3 days between payments to mine a free pool.