I notice the mining pool (ie. stratum and mpos) seems to keep running while it's reindexing for v1.5.  Is this by design?

Ya, I'm not sure if the first post is ever updated? Anyway, a better pool list is here:

https://kittehcoin.info/wiki/mining-pools/

http://meow.cutk.com (full disclosure: I run this pool) running fine and fast.  We found a few block so the pool is fully tested and functional, just need miners to bring up hash rate.  

I have noticed weirdness with mpos even on my own site. They have been making a lot of changes lately, I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it. You might try the contact form and see if they can look up your account in the database.

Also, if you have gmail you can change your address by adding "+whatever" to it and you will still get the mail. So if your address is "google@gmail.com" you can also use "google+meowpool@gmail.com" as a different address that goes to the same account. This might let you register a new account (not sure if this is a good or bad thing to do but personally who cares if someone has a duplicate account).

Shameless plug:
http://meow.cutk.com

Full disclosure: We need more miners to get a first block, lol... Seriously though, it is my intent to build this in to a premier MEOW pool whatever it takes. I have a bunch of servers waiting to be added as load increases and I will try to stay on top of any issues as quickly as possible. I'm all for as many pools as possible though, it helps prevent DDOS attacks by spreading out the attack surface.

Just be careful when looking at trends/statistics like that. The people with all the coin can and do shift them around to make the graphs look like whatever they want at that moment and it can change instantly. Must be nice to be rich, 

It's not unusual to hit a 200% or more block occasionally.

The hashrate thing is weird. I believe it has something to do with mpos because if you click "my workers" it will show something close to the real number but in the dashboard it's randomly all over the place. I don't believe any of the pools are stealing your work, I know for a fact I do not yet still see somewhat random hash values. With that said, I just updated to the latest mpos and it seems to be better ( http://meow.cutk.com ) but maybe not fixed entirely.  Currently not under DDOS but not much mining. I need to find at least one block to set the stats correctly (currently showing millions of shares, heh).

Edit:
I take that back, even with the recent mpos updates the hash rate in the dashboard is all over the place. Not sure if this is mpos or possibly the kittehcoin network itself. As far as I can tell hashing is normal though, maybe nothing to worry about. 

This coin needs more pools so the few that exist don't keep getting DDOS'd.

Here is a new one:
http://meow.cutk.com
or
https://meow.cutk.com (if you want encryption and accept the self-signed SSL cert)

VARDIFF, PPLNS. It's new so the stats are wonky from my tests. Still tweaking but DDOS protection methods are in place. This is the only mining server I currently run so I'll be watching it closely.

I was planning to test this guy fully before the difficultly got too high but right now it's above my personal ability to find a block within a reasonable time so even if you could join just long enough to get a single block it would help get this thing running. 

I guess this is technically correct but in my real life experience I only get 50% of the predicted return.

Saying there are too many alt coins because Bitcoin exists is like saying there are too many web sites because yahoo/google/whatever exists. Many will be created, suck, and die but some will survive.

Although I do agree that the main reason why anyone creates alt coins is to get in early because they missed the older coins and want to make new ones easily. When people realize how easy it was for the first BTC users to generate millions of coins and horde them they feel cheated (and rightly so I guess).