...The pools won't last anyway so it is not a problem in the long run...
Correct.
Check the Delegate Explorer at
https://explorer.lisk.io/delegateMonitor, then
DO THE MATH.
The top tier individual forgers have around 14% approval, or around 14M votes. The top pools have 17.0 to 17.5% approval, or around 17.5M votes. It seems reasonable to say that pools have attracted 3.5M votes from Lisk holders wanting to use the pools as a "faucet".
Any delegate, including pools, ideally forge around 85 blocks per day with each block currently yielding a 5 Lisk reward. That's 85*5 = 425 Lisk per day, or 365*425 = 155,125 Lisk per year. Every Lisk vote for a pool gets 155,125 / 17,500,000 = 0.0088642 Lisk per year as their "reward".
The annual financial return on ANY Lisk Pool vote is well under 1% per year. Let's look at the 3.5M votes that pools have apparently attracted over and above baseline delegate voting. These "faucet hopeful" voters get to split 155,155 / (3.5M/17.5M) = 31,025 Lisk per year among themselves. At 15 cents per Lisk,
the vocal pro-pool posters in this thread are splitting up the equivalent of less than $5000 per year from a pool among themselves. If YOU are voting "only for pools", how much of this $5000 will YOU get? Take your Lisk pool vote total, divide it by 3,500,000, and multiply it by 5000. That final number, in dollars, is how much you are going to make in the next year from the pool you voted for.
Also, the pool rewards go down by 20% per year as the Lisk block reward goes from 5 to 4 to 3 to 2 to 1 Lisk.
You wanna make money? Do what I did, move your financial assets from Lisk to something like ICONOMI that offers the hope of a financial return much greater than "under 1% from pool payouts".
You want to support a development project with great potential to revolutionize blockchain technology? Do what I do, run a testnet Lisk node at your own expense, or a mainnet Lisk node even as a Standby Delegate, or maybe soon even run a Lisk sidechain delegate node. You will spend a lot of money on computer server rentals and you will have to worry about whether your Lisk node is running every single moment of every single day. But you will be supporting Lisk, and Lisk is worth supporting.
Guys, don't argue about pool voting. If you want to do it, do it. Go for a couple of months and ask yourself if you are making what you had hoped. The answer will be no. Then move on to the next thing in your crypto journey. Good luck to you.
The human mind has never invented a labor-saving machine equal to algebra. ~Author Unknown