Envy, I actually agree with the previous 2016 block average, I'm just wondering if that in certain extreme situations might not make the diff "liquid" enough and could hurt the profitability of the coin, especially if we gained a whole bunch of hash for a long period of time. I can think of a couple of extreme scenarios in either direction where that could cause problems. I also am not sure that it's a significant enough change to make it worth another fork, at least right now. The major issue got fixed last time, this is something we can watch more long term IMO.
No, it's not worth forking again now. I'm just throwing it out there to keep in mind for the next wallet update, which is going to happen eventually.
As for difficulty liquidity, I don't think it's that big a problem. If the hashrate slowly builds up (with the diff following it), then suddenly dissapears for some reason, the resulting long block time will quickly drive the 2016 block average time way up, and consequently the difficulty way down (since it would still be retargeted every 36 blocks).
Say you spend 4 weeks at 10 net GH/s, getting 10-minute block times. Then 8 GH/s goes away and you get 50-minute block times (b/c you have 1/5 the hashpower) for 36 blocks (30 hours). With the current mechanics the diff would retarget to 1/5 it's previous rate, allowing the 8 GH/s to come right back in and get 2-minute block times for 36 blocks (1.2 hours). Instead, using a straight average over the previous 2016 you would have 10.7 minute blocks and the difficulty would drop by 7%. Now if the 8 GH/s comes back, you get 9.3 minute blocks (instead of 2-minute). If it doesn't, you get 45 minute blocks for another 28 hours until the next retarget, where it would drop about about another 7%. It would keep dropping by about 5-10% every day until hashpower picked up again, and under the circumstances I assumed above, it would hit half the difficulty in about a week. The advantage over a regular 1 or 2 week retarget is that the difficulty isn't stuck forever if hash drops, but can also respond quickly.
Say the network is steady at 1 GH/s and rises to 10 GH/s between retargets. The blocks come every minute for at most 1/2 an hour, then difficulty retargets to 4x, the 9 GH/s jumpers leave, and the 1 GH/s core is stuck with 40-minute block times (this is what we see now). Instead, the 2016 block average time would be 9.84 minutes and the first retarget would be only 1.2% higher. If the jumpers stick around another 36 blocks (36 minutes), the 2016 average goes to 9.68 minutes, and the diff jumps another 1.5%. After 360 blocks (6 hours, the planned retarget TIME), the difficulty would have gone up 10 times to 17% higher than it started - which might cut into profitability. After 640 blocks (~12 hours), it would have gone up about 18 times to a 40% higher difficulty. This lets profitability (which is heavily based on the coin's value) truly determine what the difficulty should be.
In short, using a longer average would be like setting a time limit on the maximum amount the difficulty can change. If it very recently changed it would not be able to jump or drop by 4x. The cumulative effect of many smaller changes would let the difficulty sync with the coin's value.