Thoughts on why the hashing rate plummeted to 1.7 P?
The easiest answer is that they shut down the rest of the miners to save money, or to sell them. I imagine that some of that hash power belonged to customers, unless those customers have managed a refund or something. Otherwise they probably could have used the spare hashes to provide RRP when it was originally due 3 months ago.
After 6 days of nothing mined, something has been mined today. Not alot.
My payment today was 30% less than what I expected. I assume that they would divvy up the block payment based on today's hash rates, not the average hash rate over the last 6 days, which would be more difficult to calculate.