I always recommend not dropping half the merged mined coins from your merge.
The public merged mining pools usually leave out at least three or four of the eight merged mined coins.
The profitability charts tend not to even list the really lucrative merged mined coins.
(For example we see at
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc that GeistGeld, XGG, is worth 1.87134824 DeVCoins per coin. Have you looked at its difficulty? Hint, it is nowhere near as difficult as even I0Coin, GRouPcoin, even CoiLedCoin, all three of which also a lot of merged mining pools leave out.)
-MarkM-