Thank you for this link! The charts here put things in a very nice visual relationship.

In the beginning, you could solo mine with a gpu. Then you had to pool your equipment to have a better chance at payouts.
Then miners pooled their money to buy the hardware to enter their online mining pool. Now people are pooling their money to buy a share of a
pool of miners going in on a hardware purchase to get it up and running on a mining pool. All with months or more delays that eat into profits.

Equipment that is capable of being relevant at the current difficulty is expensive and needs more and more power and cooling is of primary concern.
It would be better operated in a professional data center than in someones basement or bedroom.
And it's always just a few months around the corner.

Hashing in the cloud seems to be the only way to go. It is the ultimate overall pooling of people to bring hashing power online with professionally
maintained hardware. If you can procure hashing power to be turned on instantly, you will always be ahead of the game.
The question is where can you get the least cost per Gh/s that is an honest operation?
I haven't found any one company that fits this need.
Some don't fit because of the old too good to be true rule and some charge so much for so little hashing power, read cloudhashing.com, that
you'll never pay off the contract let alone make any coin.
So is this model of providing hashing power on demand a pipe dream? Does it need more time to mature? Is my conclusion just completely off track?