I understand concept of luck and variance as it relates to bitcoin mining. Unfortunately the results speak for themselves. The data says you've already lost the 'luck' game.
As of exactly right now, if you have been mining on p2pool for the past 3 months, you have paid a 9.8% premium entirely due to luck. (I don't know if this percentage includes those orphaned blocks I see on p2pool.info)
During this time, for the past 3 months, the difficulty has ranged from about 19 million 3 months ago to 112 million today. You don't get another chance to mine at this difficulty range to make up for your lost gamble on luck.
Assuming your luck changes such that you will break even on luck over the next 3 months and you regain your 9.8% premium so that you are back to 100% over past 180 days, you are still mining at a higher difficulty of 112 million - 180+million. (forecast of a conservative 10% increase each difficulty adjustment for 3 months)
I believe you are making an emotional judgment staying with p2pool and gambling that your luck will turn around during the next 3 months. (gambler's fallacy) It is better to cut your losses and switch to a stable pool, with a reasonable fee and then switch back to p2pool when difficulty stabilizes so you are not gambling low-difficulty-mining-time.
disclosure: I ran p2pool with a LS for a month spending time tweaking, adjusting, and watching my mining rewards dwindle away due to difficulty increases, bad luck, and orphaned blocks before I realized what was happening. I then quickly put a stop to it. I know how difficult it would be to toss out all the hard work you've done building the p2pool node. I know it's not easy.
My realistic suggestion is this:
Do an experiment where you assign one BFL single to commercial pool of your choice (say Eclipse, because I know you don't hate BFL/Josh yet ), and another to an independant p2pool payout address and have a competition. See which miner generates the most income after 3 months. This will conclusively confirm or deny your hypothesis that p2pool is an appropriate choice for maximizing mining rewards.
I disagree. The decision to go with P2Pool over a more centralized system was based on ideals, not emotions. I also believe that luck will always balance out to 100% over the long term, so you using the past as it relates to this point in time after a period of bad luck seems like a biased argument that will quickly turn around (see the 2 block rewards in 11 minutes we received earlier today). Each time we experience a period of bad luck people want change. It always balances out... Changing after a period of bad luck will always be the wrong thing to do. It would make more sense to me if people were calling for change after an extreme period of good luck... That would at least be sensible. Don't get me wrong, I completely understand your argument and I have stated in the past that I believe we would make higher profits by chasing whatever pool is offering the best deal of the day. I choose to support P2Pool because I believe it is better for Bitcoin, and Bitcoin succeeding will have a far greater effect on the value of your BTC than squeezing a few % points by supporting a centralized mining pool.
I also believe your math is flawed due to our P2Pool node being local, which is causing the % of our accepted shares to be higher than the average P2Pool user. That gives us a larger slice of the reward pie. Not to mention we're paying 0.9% in fees as opposed to paying 7.5% to mine PPS @ BTCGuild.