I was speaking with some miners at a recent conference and most start here but leave.
so it looks like this pool just can't reach a higher rate to smooth out some of the variance.
The reward system irons out the variance as much as possible, unlike PPLNS pools and related reward system pools.
Eligius is around 5% of the network, and while not a huge amount, is still average of 8 blocks per day, so, variance isn't really that huge. At one point Eligius was over 25% of the network, and while we haven't lost any hash rate since then really, the big farms seem to continue to grow and push the percentage of the network of all of the original pools down...
Eventually all of the original pools combined will probably be only a small percentage of the network.