Thanks for the comments. I appreciate it.

Agree that a 1% total fee is something for people to think about. Especially when there are 0% nodes around.

The goal is that a high quality service would offset the costs by producing a superior return. Doesn't take much downtime or orphan shares to 'cost' 1% of your income. Of course my nodes are pretty new so there's no track record of that superior return of course to be fair 

In the overall picture of how volatile the mining business is (given diff changes, new asics, power costs, USD/BTC exchange rate) in a way a fixed 1% is relatively small to the overall risk/returns. I guess I'm hoping that there may be some miners out there who are willing to pay a moderate fee for a reliable good quality service. Maybe mining is too hard nosed for that though.

You've got a good point about development funding. Although, if nobody makes donations to pay for p2pool development then will it continue to exist? Then we're left with the commercial pools using proprietary software and charging 3% fees with all the centralization and other issues that go with it. Tragedy of the commons I guess.

If there really is no significant movement in p2pool development for a few months then I imagine the community will just end up cutting donations to zero (if they're not there already) and hope that someone steps in to maintain the code.

Let's see what happens anyway. If I can attract some hashrate to profile it I'd be interested to know if efficiency/returns are better than other 0% pools. If not then I guess we'll see.

Would love to know what other miners think. Will you only consider using a 0% pool?