the reason for pools was due to the issue where network difficulty gets so high smaller and medium size miners will find it a lot harder to hit blocks and find deadlines.

pool mining was introduced to burst at the milestone block 6000 i think meaning you could only pool mine after that block..

people say pool mining goes against centralization but thats false. the block chain is still decentralized. and all the nodes are as well. all a pool does is accept submissions from miners then forwards them to the wallet.

if the network difficulty went up double from here every miner would find it twice as hard to find decent deadlines.

Thanks for the message btw its appreciated :)