The difficulty is continuing to go up. You're not going to keep getting the same gains. You should stick with one of the bigger pools. That's either Ravenminer or Suprnova. Personally, I try to not use Suprnova. I never get good hashrates there and I feel like I'm underpaid compared to other pools. Their reporting is shitty and sometimes doesn't update.
As far as I know in my short mining experience, difficulty goes up or down depending on number of miners present...I have seen significant drops in miner count when market revives or RVN price goes down and vice versa...and more often I have seen drop in revenue, but very seldom any noticeable increase when diff goes down...I think pools turn out to be biggest skimmers and there is no way to prove it ...I mean pools in general...
Suprnova is my goto for reliability - saying that now seems silly just after the pigeon found the announcement above :-)
Block rewards : see times. More people same block rewards. If they get any faster they will have all the blocks
169113 04/15/2018 09:49:09 anonymous 22905.2876 5000.00 114.39
169107 04/15/2018 09:44:42 anonymous 22905.2876 5000.00 87.69
169101 04/15/2018 09:41:23 anonymous 22905.2876 5000.00 2.14
169100 04/15/2018 09:41:05 maradonalopez 22905.2876 5000.00 521.74
169082 04/15/2018 09:21:27 anonymous 22905.2876 5000.00 130.94
It is so reliable it gets a bit boring (I need to check things) so I've found a pool that is a bit more fun
I'm not going to mention it as I don't want to draw attention.
I've even mashed together other peoples hard work and got my own miner going - I've been logging the connections and don't see any hidden dev fee's going out.
...except for one but that used my address and my user so not sure what that was all about. I'm no master coder so that got a bit hard.