It was the easiest way to setup mining and bring in BTC. I can't think of any other simpler way to download 1 software, and bring in 100 dollars worth of bitcoin every month on a 5 year old gaming computer.
100% correct. When I first started mining I used Nicehash while I learned the ropes. I realized it was more profitable to mine to a pool directly but didn't know enough. Still though, I can see why so many people continued to use it. You didn't have to mess around with a bunch of different altoin exchanges or following the markets to be sure the the coins you were mining weren't crashing, or checking to see if difficulty and hashrate was rising at an extreme rate. Strangely you don't see this much hate for Nemos Miner, Multipoolminer, Zpool, or anything else. I can assure everyone that ZPool is more responsible for killing profitability than Nicehash.