It's not about the system of pool mining etc, people don't want to work with each other, would you want to work under Wu's management? what you suggest couldn't work with current connection speed between computers, solo or pooled, both can see the blocks at the exact same time. what if all the mining machines are in the same place and connected to the same network but still participating in mining as a pool? you don't really know who is in a pool till you hear it from them, they announce their participation in a pool and the pool advertises to attract more hash power, how do you know who is in a pool and who is not if they don't tell you?
You don't know who is in a pool. The point is that the next block is announced and everyone does not hear about it instantly. In one of the papers I referenced it says it takes something like 12 seconds to travel across the entire network. This means that if someone "close" to you on the network mines a block then you will be able to get started on the next block sooner than someone in Timbuctu. This gives you an advantage if you are a part of a large pool that mines many of the networks blocks thus pushing big pools towards 51% because it is more profitable to mine in big pools.
No body forced you to accept some beggar from Timbuctu if that's even a place, lol. nowadays you could receive the data with the speed of light, since light could travel around the earth more than 20 times in a second, you'd need to be farther than the distance between the sun and the earth to receive with 12 minutes delay(EDIT: me being a beggar all the time, I thought you said 12 mins, but now I see that was 12 seconds, still you'd need to be on the moon to receive with 12 seconds delay. full stop lol.). pools grow big but not that big, when a participant grows big enough in hash power, he/she starts to mine on his own when he/she is sure to have enough hash power to find blocks by solo mining, and then smaller participants join him/her until they become a solo miner.
A big pool consisting of hundreds of small miners has a disadvantage of few seconds of latency if none of them grow to go their separate ways and always stay with a single pool.