From my experience of this launch:
Initial launch was a bit problematic for people, as solo mining was an orphanfest, and the pools were not given the right code to be able to launch at the start
After close to an hour, the pools started to come online, and because of the sheer volume of blocks being found, stat's were crazy (still not the best!) but they were paying out - it just showed up delayed
So, whilst the difficulty is still low, I'm continuing to mine on the pools - yes the figures are still a little screwed up, but they're 100% paying out and finding blocks