I find AM to be remarkably accurate in revenue estimation. Mining equihash the amount AM estimates is pretty spot on.
I agree i tested it on Nice hash for about a hour one time an watched AM it was as you said pretty spot on. ofc others for what ever reason will say I'm wrong which is fine but i did also test it one day and i did get what it said i would, give or take one or two bucks off so to me that is pretty dam accurate, it's all way gonna be off more or less depending on the time or what it is selling for the next day .
I'm not sure profit mining is worth it using some services, but it's a big feature of AM, and that brings in new users.
It is unfortunate that there are many new folks who don't understand how profit switching works, and how AM is calculating
potential profit. Your mileage will vary a lot depending on how the pool handles exchanges, the price at the time it hits the exchange, difficulty spikes, pool fees, PPLNS losses from switching too fast, pool luck, miner fees, etc.
Folks think that whattomine is the gospel, when it's nothing more than a general state of things at that point in time. Estimated profits on services like zpool, mph, and others are "estimated" for a reason. AM is just reporting what the services says... again at that point in time. Nicehash is a little unique because it calculates your BTC payments based upon the demand from renters on the service and the algo of the moment. Nicehash's "hot coin" is not necessarily tied to exchange rates, hashrates, and difficulty, but what renters are willing to pay to go after those coins. Renters have all kinds of different strategies, like tackling low difficulty coins when they start their downswing so they get more coin for their rented hashrate. Or hitting a PPS pool right after a block with a ton of rented hashrate to boost their shares, then switch to another coin or pool at another block.
If someone really truly wanted to profit switch, they would setup individual pools for their favorite coins (you could even use the built in online services pools), and make a pool group to switch between those coins... then AM would switch using whattomine data. Set AM's switching interval to check for changes in data to a much higher rate than 10 minutes (probably best set to hours) and the profit switch threshold %... then AM will switch much less often, and you will get a nice steady and mostly predictable payout.