For me, it was a near real-time snapshot of the health of my mining hash rate vs. the pool hash rate.
It may take some getting used to, but can you try looking at the shifts page for this?
It shows your average hash rate in the latest shifts, and this is what the "pay per block" estimate was based on. Sure, it's 10 numbers instead of 1. But it also tells you roughly when there was a problem if you had some downtime. This is your mining health in the pool. The shifts page also shows the pool hashrate, although I think that is less useful as it doesn't affect your average earnings, only the variance.