I concur.
As a relative newbie after a lot of research I settled on this pool. It is widely regarded as fair and well run. It's also been here for ages (in internet time)
The beauty of the vast internet is that if someone disagrees, they an upsticks and head off elsewhere.
What the internet does also give them the right to do, is sit here whinging.
That's just a waste of time and hashes IMHO 

I suspect that the rate of return will decline to such a level that it becomes more if a hobby for most of us, anyway. 

Been a member since 2011, Just feel things have not been going so smooth since Jan 2014 

Slush is a good pool don't get me wrong, just wondering what happened my logs show stratum server went off line. I have a backup ADSL as well as my Fibre line and my local internet never dropped.

The connection to the Stratum server dropped!!

Hopefully over the next 24 hours Slush will rise from this 20%

Seems odd that other pools are racking in so many rounds in ahhhh luck these days

I understand your questions a 100% , and when you are dealing with money only a dumb man doesn't ask questions ... I'm a little skeptical of people who replied to your post who have only, one or two history posts.. I myself am VERY new , and I understand your concern.. Honestly I would love to know the data points you keep an eye on so that I can learn more. As for the LARGE drop you seen... Keep this in mind... the stratum servers may not have went down, they may have only became unreachable from your point of view.. I work for a global ISP, and built the US's first OC 192 coast to coast... when traffic traverses the internet it has to pass from what I call the edge routers up to a particular route reflector that services a specific region of the US.. If the route reflector shifts this type of dynamic traffic, you WILL see a drop ... I have seen these complaints come in a MILLION times over from companies that deal in online trading of MAJOR us companies ... I can tell you this, It can happen .... The listeners of the stratum servers are up, but "a portion" of traffic is dropped on the traverse ... It all boils down to trust, honestly that sucks... but it is what it is .. I just got in this to play around and see what it is all about, like I said I'm a beginner when it comes to "Bitcoin" pools but I have YEARS and YEARS experience in networking and server support.. I have supported some of the worlds biggest businesses and I have seen things like this a lot and there is very rarely ill intention . I'm not saying that being skeptical is bad, its good to ask question, but you need to also understand the limitations of the answers that can be given .

Could be worse... Eclipse had a 37 hour block a few days ago and is currently working on a 17 hour block. 

Small pools are not for the feint of heart. Or, people who sit and watch them all day. 

been Slushing since May 2013, nothing has changed except the Pools hashrate.

Every pool has it's good and bad times. What matters is the pool trust and support, which keeps it running. Just few examples from the past:
deepbit (my second favourite pool) is so far the only pool which had over 51%, but is now below 1Th ... just because it has no stratum (yet)
BTC Guild was close to 50% with the help of ASIC miner, but is now overrun by GHash.IO, while ASIC miner is not even on the chart
50BTC and EMC were much more than Slush at some point in time, but are now out of the chart.

Some day Slush may go out of the chart too, just because the mining became corporate business, but until then and until the pool is supported there is no reason to leave it, because of a bad day ... be it luck, DDoS or other (short, because Slush is fixing them) connectivity or stability problems.

I am sure people who went through a 12hour round followed by a 16 hour round wouldn't be happy and probably tried something else. .  not much you can do, its "luck" at that point. .   We did get a 1:14 round but are now on a 5+ hour round now. ..

you need to login to the pushover site, create a new application, name it, then it will give you an api token.  put that and your user key in pushover.yaml and run `ruby blockfound.rb pushover`

I hope we get 5 more!!

nice app. . .   not sure I want to run it on a linux box just to get updates though :-). .   but pretty cool. .

though not sure I want to be getting block updates. . .   it might be pretty depressing waiting for one for 10, 12, 16+ hours