So 1 big pool please, the more pools we get the longer we search for blocks, the less we earn.
You really
don't want one centralized pool. You'll soon enough find out why if you stuck around here a little longer.
i'm just letting my thoughts wander here... is there any way that the bitcoin protocol could be changed to only permit solo mining?
not that it would be a desirable scenario, as there are too many large farms who would have owners rubbing their hands thinking they could 'own' bitcoin.
but, is it possible? i'm no coder so i wouldn't have the first clue about this... just pondering...
No. The reason that block explorers like blockchain.info can "tell" which pool found a block is because the pools use the same node (with a static IP address) to relay their found blocks. A pool could easily change this procedure to relay each new found block from a different node (and potentially to have the block subsidy sent to a new address). This would make it appear that a new node was finding each new block but would reduce transparency for a pool's users