I though the same thing until I switched, you should try. On top of that I think everyone should switch as a protest. The pools hashrate suffering a substantial drop should get Phonetics attention and motivate him to fix this problem.
Normally yes but he already dropped 1 GH/s and 600-800 users so i don't think he consider it.
It could be that something happend to him, normally he wrote back, but he wasn't online since 2 days which is not the normal activity from him, in my opinion just don't mine, switch to another pool (I will also create my own pool, currently config and code optimizations are in progress and the design) , hope that nothing happend to him in person and that we get payed out after some days.