About the second point : seems complicated. How about simply putting the 599 previous shares in every found share, and when one is a "winner", pay all the previous 599 shares ? Regardless whether they are from a previous block or not. This is much simpler, allows complete decentralization and still pool-hop resistant.

The network finds, in average, 1 block every 10 minutes (and it's often less because the difficulty only resets every 2 weeks).
A block should be found, in average, after 600 of your shares. So that's pretty much 1 share per second to announce to all the miners !

Also, you claim it to be mostly decentralized at the moment, yet you handle the payouts. How do you ensure the generated shares only give the 50 BTC to you ? (Ie, a malicious miner that finds a "winning" share could keep it for himself and take the 50 BTC). That needs an explanation in my opinion.

GPLv3 (now). What exactly were you thinking of doing?

Created.

For some reason I'm still getting about 7% rejected shares. If everyone else has about 1% I'm sure I'm doing something wrong.

An excellent suggestion. I agree but think that for other sites to thrive bitcoin.org should, as suggested eventually try to limit its scope to core Bitcoin functionality and architecture issues.

An excellent point as well regarding the social engineering and single point failure vulnerabilities inherent in the current format.

What DID generate a huge amount of interest was Bitcoin as a barter medium. Clients hate to fork over a wad of $20s- it's a bit crude and ruins the experience for many. Within our community barter or "tribute" as a means for paying for service is very common. Unfortunately the goods and services that a client has to offer usually are not the ones that the business or it's contractors need. Bitcoins enable any client to earn sufficient funds to visit my facility with a modest investment of goods or his professional expertise. This has a great deal of appeal for salaried employees, who budget for a certain amount of time at the facility each month, and cannot easily increase their income under current market conditions, as well as for the large number of clients who prefer not to pay directly with cash for esthetic reasons.

In-house we have been referring to this as the "Cookie Factor". My neighbors will help me put up a shelf for a tin of cookies or a casserole, trying to pay them in cash equivalent to their time spent on the shelf or my time baking cookies would create discomfort all around. If I tell my clients Bitcoin is "cash", they already pay cash- so have no incentive to go through the hassles of acquiring Bitcoin. Bitcoin as a digital representation of their labor, or goods is another matter.

If you want to, donate the "bounty" to ius which works hard to help us out with both bugs and improvements.

Best idea I've read so far today!  but I've only been on 30 minutes this morning.

It would definitely make reading the mining section a lot easier than it is in its current state.  Sometimes I go in looking for specific information and have to wade through a lot of seemingly junk posts to actually find it.

I'm offering to pay you 5BTC should you release a detailed explanation of the problem, and the fix.  I don't even mine in your pool (I actually hopped on IRC the first day you started to give you a couple suggestions/features that I would have needed to join).  This way, you are now splitting the cost and the entire community as a whole benefits.

It's GPL so it can be embedded into GPL software.