Nope, that was the point of my example.
It's to do with when you stop mining and the average expected amount of time you will mine and gain nothing for it.
(which will be - on average half the average expected time it takes to find a share)
I get that it was your point but it is still wrong.
Nothing is lost. Saying the amount of time mined and you gain nothing is a fallacy. Also stopping right after you find a share or block to minimize "lost work" is also a fallacy. The very next hash could just as likely be another share or block.
Still the issue you were "helping" with had nothing to do with granularity. The user wasn't mining for HOURS. In any PPLNS or DGM pool his compensation likely would have been ZERO. p2pool due to the fact that it has n = ~4.5 kept shares earned in the last 24 hours and resulted in some compensation.