What's the deal with the payout queue recently? It's usually at most 3-4 days to get to the top (which conviently is about how long it takes my 2 S1s to mine my 40 TBC minimum.) Now I've hit my minimum and it's been over 4 days since my last payout and I'm still 14 blocks down on the queue

It worries me a little bit because it seems the pool is increasing its "debt" when logically that shouldn't be. The BTC in the payout queue should have all been earned and are now owed to the miners. We're not taking about shelved shares here, these are BTC that have already been mined.
Say the pool shuts down tomorrow (not saying it will but bear with me.) What happens to all the miners who have a balance on their account? Obviously new blocks won't be mined so we can't be paid out the traditional way. Do you have enough BTC in cold storage to pay everyone off? Right now there's a staggering 571.77 BTC in the payout queue and that's not even counting the miners who haven't hit their minimum. Furthermore, how does the cold storage wallet get paid? Do you send off a percentage of each new block to it? Or is it only credited when the payout system goes into "fallback" mode?
This just confuses me because the point of the CPPSRB system is that there will never be more BTC in shares credited than what the pool actually mines. Yet it seems the "debt" in the payout queue continues to grow and we're at the mercy of the miners tomorrow to pay off what we mined yesterday.