Whew! I didn't mean to start a heated argument! XD
Lol, sorry about that.
Yes! On average, the payout would be the same, no matter where the shares go. I do believe however, part time mining at PPLNS is a bigger gamble. If you work during the first N shares of a round, and decide to stop to play a game, from that point on your shares start losing value. If during this time a big miner comes in, and in the next few hours another N shares are submitted, your shares would be a complete waste.
The value of your shares changes as more information about the near future of the pool is revealed. This has nothing to do with whether or not you continue to mine at the pool yourself. If I submit a share it will lose value as non-block-generating shares are submitted and gain value when blocks are found; N pool shares after my submission the
true value of my share will be fully revealed. Exactly the same happens at proportional pools and, indeed, with most reward systems. A share is behaving very much like the scratch card I described which has a 1/4 chance of being a winner ($4 prize). The value of the scratch card is $1 (expected value) but, when it is scratched to reveal no prize its value decreases $0. The risk of this decrease in value remains whether or not you decide to buy more cards before scratching the first.
The only two sound ways of mining I'm aware of which don't decrease the value of your share as future non-block-generating shares are submitted (i.e. have zero share variance) are PPS and PPLNS with N = 1 (effectively solo mining). These are both completely hop-proof and don't favour 24/7 mining over intermittent mining. PPS requires a fee to be sustainable (at 0% the pool balance will follow a random walk and will become arbitrarily large and negative at points in the future). This problem cannot be avoided (SMPPS tries to avoid it by placing the random walk along the time axis - this is more subtle but equally flawed).
It is not possible to hop this pool in the way you describe without some kind of time machine. To "reverse pool hop" you need to know when a round is going to end.
That falls in the same kind of probability as hopping a prop pool. If you know when N comes and goes in a specific round, you have better odds of not *over working* for the same payout. Now, it may not work every time, but just like standard hopping, it probably works enough to make it worth the trouble.
I agree that the mechanic for hopping is similar to that for a proportional pool. However, a proportional pool can be effectively hopped with information from the past whereas, a PPLNS pool can only be exploited using information from the future. I agree that you don't need to know exactly when the round will end but the lack-of-memory property of the distribution of future blocks w.r.t. shares tells us that the current round duration gives us absolutely no information on the expected number of blocks in the next N shares.