I don't know too much about the technology details, but I have always felt that mining pools are a risk. For example, how long until the governments start mandating KYC, and the pools either comply or get forcibly shut down?
I once read some short passage about a decentralization idea regarding pools, was it called peer-2-pool or something like that? What happened to it? How did/does it work? I assume such a scheme would distribute the whole block reward, fees and all, since there's nowhere else for it to go.