Hi,

I'm new here.  Sorry if this is answered elsewhere - I tried searching but couldn't find any info on it.
I am wondering if mining pools were originally thought about when Satoshi originally designed Bitcoin, and if they are in fact a desirable thing to have as part of the network.
As far as I understand, with the way that the hashing/block generation works today, mining pools are 'encouraged' because you can have a pool where no particular miner has the information to generate the block and collect the block reward themselves.  If with some other hashing mechanism it was enforced that the miners had all the information they needed to generate the block themselves, it would discourage pools because any pool member could 'steal' a block.
Secondly, are mining pools desirable in the network?  There are many scare stories about pools having too much hashing power and potentially reaching 51%.  And really, a mining pool could be considered like a single node (a huge node) in the network.  I am reading back on when the blockchain fork occurred due to a bug in v0.8 of the client, and how mining pools were encouraged to downgrade to v0.7 to fix the issue.  Whilst it was a good outcome, is it not very scary that in a distributed network, where one of the key principles if that you do not trust other peers, it is possible to convince enough hashing power to change client version?
Thanks for any info and corrections in my understanding.
PS. I have read about 2P-PoW (2 phase proof of work) which is a proposed change to disincentivise pools, but not sure what the community opinion is on something like that.

Dannytrigo