Yes siree, I do hate merged mining.
Yeah it does complicate things BUT I would argue that things are going to get more complicated anyways. Pools will eventually need to use to provide a mechanism to update miners when transactions change (when fees becoming more importantly). p2pool needs a method to track when the share chain has changed. Likely in the future there will be other as of yet implemented events which will require altering the work being done.
Using LP for everything is an ugly hack but it works. However what all this ugliness is pointing to is the fact that the pool-miner communication protocol needs to be more robust. Miners today are relatively "dumb" and rely too much on the server.
Actually, to correct that statement ...
There is no proper protocol definition, however some before have mentioned deepbit's web page where they have 'a' definition.
And that definition is the problem - it's next to useless.
It needs to be designed (not hacked), then standardised and then placed/updated in the wiki.
I still do not understand why it is true that a very high % of miners use pools but the wiki is useless in defining the pool protocol.
(damn I need to hurry up and find the time to get around to writing my own and testing/implementing it ...)
