Those pools are awesome.
Gaw's lost but I think gaw will come up with something to make up the difference...can we say zen256hash pool? Hehe!
The best thing was to buy the hashlets at $15.99 back in the beginning. If you would have loaded up with them back then you would be in a better position.
The fact that they relied so much on nicehash bothers me. I don't think they'll be able to create an equivalent alternative to use for their own. Because, even nicehash wouldn't have been anything with the people putting orders for hashrate, let alone that I don't think GAW has the resources,time and people with enough knowledge to build something like that.
I think you are forgetting about their highly trained businessmen. They eat average Joe pool owner for breakfast.
Joking aside, they do not need to recreate nicehash. They just need to find some way to offer decent payouts that have a chance in hell of ROI. They can do that with Zenpool256 without needing to make anything other than a webpage and an algorithm of their own devising.
Back to mining BURST for me. It pays out better than hashlets so far!