Some interface changes planned for early November. Specifically, the Dashboard is going to be updated to be less worker-centric, and more PPLNS/earnings centric. Instead of giving you a breakdown of each worker, it will give you a full account summary like it does now at the top, a section for your total speed/accepted/rejected rates, and a section dedicated to PPLNS shifts and recent block payments received. Hopefully, this will make the PPLNS system more intuitive for new users, or even old users who still aren't quite sure how PPLNS works internally.
Part of this update will also be preparing the dashboard for AJAX functionality to allow auto updating of the dashboard stats. It won't be enabled initially, but will be before the end of the month. Users without any workers on PPLNS, or users who do not like the new interface, will be able to revert back to the "classic" dashboard on the Settings page once the new version is added. I've been very anti-AJAX due to "idle tab on your browser" syndrome where users leave the dashboard up all day, sometimes on multiple computers. Now that the database server has been upgraded, and a new API server is almost ready, this shouldn't be an issue anymore, even with how many thousands of people use BTC Guild daily.
Ajax is not that bad as you think on server resorces.
Could you pm me when you possibility find that backplane?