I'm complaining about excessive failsafes.
The failsafes don't affect your earnings in any way, so, nothing to complain about. They are there for a reason. Eligius generally runs on fully automatic up to the moment coinbase transaction payouts when a block is found, 25+ BTC at a time. This is completely irreversible, is a large amount of coins being paid at once, and any mistakes can mean disaster. The failsafes prevent any potential disaster, even if it is a bit trigger happy sometimes, I'd much rather have a failsafe than a situation where someone ends up overpaid at the expense of other miners. The failsafes pause the reward system, give me a chance to loo over the cause, and if all is well just let it continue and do a manual payout later.
For example, lets say Eligius finds a block and for some reason the reward system isn't able to tally the payouts for whatever reason (bitcoind issue, long orphan race, whatever)... if the system were to continue it could potentially overpay people who would be in the next block either because it wasn't able to determine the exact amounts paid initially, or because it pays shelved shares for a block that go further back than they should (due to the orphan). Keep in mind that even the internal structure of Eligius is a bit decentralized. As an example, CPPSRB actually monitors the blockchain for our blocks and utilizes that information in conjunction with information from the shares databases. All of this is to keep Eligius as secure as possible and to ensure that every payout is accurate.
There is no other pool like this, since every other pool takes 100% of earnings 100% of the time, then distributes them to you. If something goes wrong, they have the funds and just fix whatever needs fixing before paying them out.
Eligius just gets the earnings directly to you 99% of the time and never touches them, so there is no margin for error. Plus, the amount of time and effort that would be needed to eliminate the very few failsafes that do occur far outweighs the benefits of doing so at this time.
Again, they don't affect your earnings whatsoever. They're there to *protect* your earnings.
And for the record, before the drive/array failure a few days ago, the last failsafe was over a month ago, and lasted a few hours. I fail to see how, even including the hardware related times, that this is excessive by any definition.
Edit: Clarifications
Edit2: Also, in the past the failsafe system was worse, triggered more often, and even missed a few disasters, resulting in personal loss to repay the difference. This was back when bitcoins were not nearly as expensive and a few coins wasn't then end of the world. Now, however, a 5 BTC loss is pretty substantial. So, I'd much rather there be 100 failsafes than have the pool lose 1/100th of a BTC.