Does seem like the Diff isn't calculating correctly or something. 3 top Hashrate pools all showing ETA for new block of ~8 minutes, and yet, it's taking over 35 minutes for a new block to be mined.
Also, not sure about Luckypool.io. I've been there through several blocks found, and at 2.8Khs I still show: Pending Balance: 0.000000000000 XAO
(Now, It's been a while since I mined CrytoNote coins, but should there at least be a .000000000001 in there somewhere? Especially since the pool calculators are showing my expected coins should be around 170/day)
Difficulty is based on the average observed hashrate for a 360 block window that lags the current blocks by about 60. The blocks themselves come in as a Poisson distribution which is very difficult to analyze accurately due to the high randomness. At least one of the pools still has a target block time of 120 causing a 50% higher network hash rate to be displayed, but that should not affect the local hash rate. You can only expect 1 - (1/e) or about 63% of the blocks to come in under the expected time listed by the pool, and you can regularly expect ones to come in much later than that. You can take a look at my charts here for more detailed block times and hash rates:
https://1drv.ms/x/s!AoILQjreP68U6j_Vq3KFcPl63ci6 (Check the Hash Rate charts sheet at the bottom for shorter average network hash rates).
As for pool payouts, you can expect it to take 2-6 hours (a little over 4 hours at the time of this writing), depending on block times for a mined block to get 60 confirmations and show up in Pending Balance, and that's only after the pool finds a block after you start mining there.
PS: The other thing to note about the "Block Found: 3 Minutes Ago" display on the mining pools is that it often shows when the block before the last one was found since it uses the last blocks timestamp. Because when a new block is found, the template for the next block is created and sent to the miners, including a timestamp; it shows when work
started on that block not when the work finished on that block.
