Sometimes I feel like every page between the front and current should be auto-pruned (since no one reads them anyway)  
I told my wife, 3 days ago, that someone was going to ask that question  

I think "patron saint" is a title is reserved for the guy who's investment could buy my house and acreage 4 times over, but I'll take the compliments where I can get them.  

For every 1 apple you earn, slush would give you less than 0.98 apple and here you'd get 1 apple.  

OK lets use simple numbers to keep it simple...

Lets pretend it takes a total of 1,000 shares to find 1 block (and to keep it simple, we'll pretend that it always takes 1,000 shares)
If you mine and submit 10 shares (and you then stop mining):

You get 1% of the payout in block 1
and
You get 0.5% of the payout in block 2
and
You get 0.333% of the payout in block 3
and
You get 0.25% of the payout in block 4
and
You get 0.2% of the payout in block 5

All for those 10 shares of that 1st needed 1,000

Note:None of these numbers are real and only for demonstration of how the system works.

You're comparing apples to oranges. You're looking at what you will get from the current block (out of the next 5) and comparing it to what you got in total somewhere else. Granted, you'll not get a total of 5x the amount of the next block, but you have to remember that the next block is just a fraction of what you will get in total.

Network difficulty is the current difficulty share required to solve a bitcoin block.

bitcoin-cli getmininginfo
{
  "blocks": 502754,
  "currentblockweight": 9280,
  "currentblocktx": 5,
  "difficulty": 1931136454487.716,
  "errors": "",
  "networkhashps": 1.384324312220417e+19,
  "pooledtx": 33864,
  "chain": "main"
}

Note the difficulty value is 1.9 trillion. This means it takes on average 1.9 trillion shares to find a block. When the pool's stats show "herp" equal to 5x that value, it will have plateaued. As hashrate rises on the pool, we find 9.6 trillion shares faster. Most of your performance will happen in a lot less than those 80 days, more like about 20 to see the bulk of the effect, but yes, the maximum you can earn currently will be if you mine here continuously for 80 days. It's the only way to guarantee fairness for people that have been consistently mining here. We're hoping for more hashrate on the pool to keep bringing that value down.