Don't forget that masternodes have recently been running at a loss too despite our 20% slice of the pie. This is probably now solved but still, we aren't raking it in at the miners expense.
How? Unless you had terrible, and I mean terrible variance over the past 2 months, MN are profitable. Assuming that's what you meant by recently...
No I meant the period between RC4 and RC5.
There was a known issue causing some masternodes to repeatedly get paid thus causing a shift in distribution of payments.
If you were a masternode owner with one or two masternodes on micro instances it was entirely possible to not be paid for weeks or months at a time. Therefore income was less than cost.
During that period I had 7 masternodes running. Whilst two of my masternodes had amazing runs of 10+ payments a day the overall average across the 7 over a one month period was 0.22DRK per day. This covered my server costs.
If you only had one or two masternodes, it was entirely possible to run at a loss.
EDIT: Forget about variance. That is how it was supposed to work (and how it is working now). Variance was broken for RC4.
I agee, had the same situation, some MNs worked at the loss even because many pools didn`t paid at all 20% fee, Now with RC5 and RC3 voting engine it look much better, only good news, Evan will enforce the network max monday 13.10.14 if not earlier... so it works cool for me now.