Well, just in case anyone gets upset about me not posting, here's a post
I know enough of the (non-rental) pool hash rate to know it's not a miner causing it, and I'm also looking into this from a few angles to make sure everything is running correctly.
With half the hash rate rental and the other half miners, and the fact that we broke the last long block with a rental, it does leave it all in the realms of the most likely answer being that it is simply just bad luck.
There's been no changes to the mining part of the pool code since I added the 🐈 to the coinbase (and only one massive change before that in the past year to include segwit and fix a 100% crash condition in the code)
I did of course (in both cases) test the code and make sure it did produce valid blocks, so unless there's some bug hiding there in the mining part of the code for months of finding blocks, I can assume it's all OK on that front (though I am checking things on that front as well of course)
The majority of the big miners are still around and that's what matters to keep the pool hash rate up, so anyone with theories about me causing it, that I've seen posted ... well ... yeah I'm not sure why I'd want the pool, that I've spent more than 3 years connected to it 24/7 every single day (except when some damn planes don't have working satellite wifi), to crash and burn ... ... ...