They funds they seized were from dwolla users. I think it was because dwolla didn't have all the necessary permits of a US financial institution. I believe they are working on that though. Mtgox is chillin
Your return should be the same on either pool. The timeframe of actually getting the currency to your wallet may differ though. For example, if a pool has say, a 600m/h pool rate, the blocks will be found quicker than a pool with say, 30m/h of combined power. The faster one will find a block every 2 - 4 hours, where the slower pool will take say 24 - 48 hours hours. The way it evens out is that your share from the slower pool will be larger than the faster pool because you aren't splitting the earnings of each block with 300 other miners, but you mine blocks slower.
This is the third Alt coin I've hopped on. The other two were LTC and BBQ Coin, both of which were profitable for me at the time. I'm hoping this one follows the same path, and then some. I've mined 800 coins so far in about 16 hours with 3 7950s pushing 1.8 - 2 Mhs