Earning Estimates And Pools - Never Get Anywhere Near Them!

Hi all,

was just wondering if everyone seems to suffer the same fate as i do when it comes to mining these Alts.
It doesnt really seem to matter which pool or coin i pick, i never get anywhere near the estimated daily coin tally - infact im lucky if i hit half of what it says!! I dont really understand the whole concept behind the difficulty levels either - even when a coin has very low difficulty the shares total ranges from the ridiculously low to the insanely high - its as if the difficulty is just some arbitary number that means nothing! How is that supposed to work?

I understand luck plays a part in this, but if thats the case then every pool i visit has none of it!
Take the fastcoin pool im currently in:
1hr avg: 180%
24hr avg: 120%
7day avg: 199%
4wk avg: 180%
12month: 170%
This is pretty much the same in almost every pool i visit, and as a result i seem to be consistantly getting peanuts. How can so many pools never hit their targets by such a margin over such a long duration?

The worst thing is, when the pool does come in for a bit of luck and finds a block fast, the only people that benefit are the 2 guys sat at the very top of the hash table raping in 14,000 hash, whilst myself with 1200hash seems to end up with 0% share of the reward because the pool has whacked such a massive difficulty on me that the round is finished before i even got a sniff of submitting a share.
Its really driving me nuts - am i missing something or doing something wrong? Does everyone else actually get anywhere near these suggested daily earnings? I try and stick it out for 24/48 hours but in the end feel i have to constantly try find a better pool because the income is just so low - most noticably this is on low difficulty coins.

Any advice or tactics for maximising coin income would be most welcome, as i feel im just not taking advantage of anything with a low difficulty rating.

thanks!