You're right that you're going to find a lot of mixed answers, much of it's based on personal feelings rather than hard cold facts (which can be difficult to really come by). I was playing around with several different options starting about 30 days ago when I decided to jump head first into the mining fray
I played with Nice Hash (before the breach), and personally it wasn't for me. Because as has been mentioned all the costs, and delays with Bitcoin (BTC) I didn't want that to be "my coin". I instead decided after reading a bit, looking around, and doing some basic testing for Ethereum (ETH) to be "my coin". I'm currently mining ETH to Ethermine.org as my primary coin and sending it to a wallet (every couple of coin's I'll transfer it to a cold storage wallet). Because Claymore's miner allows you to dual mine, when tweaked right at a very slight hit to ETH mining plus more power usage, I am currently mining Decred (DRC) to Nice Hash (NH) which is converting to BTC and I then send over to Coinbase (CB), since NH and CB have an agreement that transfers between them are free.... I suspect NH is having CB manage their wallet now for security reasons, then transfer that to Gdax (it's the same company so transfers are free) and place a limit order to sell it. Based on initial testing and calculations the 2nd coin mining is paying the electric bill.
Also, because I'm a control freak (~20 yrs in IT + ~12 in IT Security, plus being a Jarhead... where did Mom go wrong?) I am running Awesome Miner (AM) to control everything - I purchased the premium edition because I wanted the extra features. I personally recommend it - they have a free version to try, but if you're even semi serious the standard or professional version is the way to go. The good thing about AM is you can set it up as a managed miner like I have, or you can have it in profit mode where it switches to what is the most profitable. From there you can mine to something like Mining Pool Hub (MPH), as you mentioned, and have it auto-convert into the coin of your choice. You'll have to do the math on that, because there is on average a 1% pool fee, a 0.2% auto conversion fee and a withdrawal fee on all the coins.
Now as a side note, I happen to have a R9 280x that was originally in my desktop that I had setup for profit mining to (MPH) and auto convert to LiteCoin (just because I have hard cash invested into LTC). However, I have now switch to mining ZClassic (ZCL) full time due to the hard fork coming up with BitCoin Private. I also have my desktop RX 580 to do some testing on, I'm dual mining mostly to ETH & Library (LBRY) for testing profit's vs's ETH & DRC, and I was also having it switch for a few hours a night to ZCL however it broke last night I think due to my upgrading to AMD's latest drivers and Claymore hasn't update his ZCash miner for it yet - I'll do a little more testing to verify, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is.
Lastly (f**k is this long enough or what), as I read on these forums, and it made sense to and for me, I have my primary coin(s) to pay the bills and hold for as long as I decide or can, and then my "extra" mining is a more long term strategic hold coin as a gamble in the future that it pays off "big" - which is my ZCL coin. Just thought it was pretty sage advice, so I'm passing it along.
