I've been casually reading about different mining pool payouts for the last week or two. In general, the consensus seems to be that PPS (and its variants like FPPS and PPS+ etc) are bad because it requires financial engineering (no block needs to be found to get paid) and is more centralizing because it benefits from scale even more than normal hashrate pooling. (At least that's my understanding. So I wouldn't hash on one, but most miners do use a PPS pool.)

NiceHash has a slightly different model they call RTPPS where third parties buy the hashrate from miners pointed to their pool, then redirect that hash to wherever the third party buyer wishes. So it's kind of like a hash market, where buyers can come in and provide the funds to provide miners with PPS style payouts in return for giving the buyer the choice of where to deploy the hash. As a result, this market brings, according to NiceHash at least, a meaningful difference in revenue for miners.

Anyway, I thought that was interesting and wanted to share.