Scooby903 ... your GIF is amazing. Number 1 in the forum.
Theoretically there is no difference in expected returns when solo mining vs. pool mining. What changes is the variance. If it takes you a week to earn a block (on average), would you rather get partial payments every day, or the whole block at once?
I almost always join pools, but I am currently mining doubloons solo right now.
I typically join pools as well, but with launches it seems the way to go right off the bat is solo for sure, as the pools crash, payouts are incorrect, etc
I've had decent luck with P2P pools though and they seem fairly stable