I was thinking that with ViaBTC being such a popular pool that they have a far better server implementation surrounding things like the process of propagation and higher spec hardware.
Nope.
It's purely the size of their total hash rate that determines how often they find blocks. That applies to
any pool. FYI: a block is found by
a single chip in a miner. That's why even a 1-chip stick miner
does occasionally find a block
Via just has more miners pointed at it and remember that these days that usually means hundreds of chips in each miner. Same goes for -ck solo pool, for whatever reason folks love throwing tons of (most often rental) hash at it so they sometimes find several (say, more than 5) blocks each year - their last 3 were from a single user who pointed >1ExH at it for a total of maybe a week.
As far as infra goes, Kano actually has better network block work distribution than most much much larger pools do. It is not that difficult or expensive to setup but most pools do not bother because network distribution speed mainly only matters in an orphan race (which are fairly rare). Given the number of blocks they find it pretty much does not matter whereas for small pools they need every speed advantage they can get when they find a block. Kano's setup broadcasts the block found message to the Bitcoin network worldwide within just a few 10's of ms so as many other pools as possible pick it up and start building on it Same applies to getting the block found message from other pools and sending out new work to Kano users to start building on it.
As far as work generation goes - again not that complex or hard to do right. Safe bet that Kano's extraordinarily high-performance main server at least matches what
any large pool is running and it certainly far exceeds -ck's setup...
