They are doing this to manipulate the reward system. The coin doesn't have a lot of net, and they control about 20% of the mining. As such, they can throttle that 20% up and down to achieve higher and lower difficulties when the network starts to gain traction.  I have literally sat here and watched them do it for almost a week now.

When they throttle back up, they generate blocks with rewards of over 10-20 XMG each. This "throttle" pattern or "pump" if you will, basically is more profitable for them. Or at least they seem to think it is.

I don't think this is organic fluctuation.  Unless there are a whole lot of "beta" or "in development" pools pushing tons of hash power that are going up and down.

Most good mining software including Wolf V2 or cpuminer-opt I believe has the option to throttle local miner instances based on overall network hash rate, not pool (super neat)! This is pretty fucking awesome, but is easily abused by larger botnets. Especially in tandem with the largest pool on such a gross share of extraction.

The only real good way to mitigate this is with auto-exchanging pools and auto switching algo's. This way, when hash rates are high, rewards low, you can switch your algo's to another coin altogether.

Just my noob observations.