I suspect this Sage character is a bot, but nonetheless, I will reply so that lurkers may see my answer to his question.
I think many miners would *say* they just want to mine with whatever pool provides the highest payout, but in fact I think that is rarely their sole consideration. A lot of miners seem to avoid smaller pools, despite that they often have lower admin fees, and thus higher payouts.
I think miners tend to avoid them for a few reasons: larger miners have a longstanding reputation for not stealing from users, plus they find blocks more often, which increases the dopamine effect of seeing a predictable amount of sats trickle into your account on a predictable schedule.
But Ocean may have begun to cross a kind of "dopamine threshold." Their miners *used to* see earnings pretty rarely, maybe once per week. But now they see them several times per day, and the amounts are higher than other pools give out, and that money typically enters a self custodial wallet. Due to crossing that threshold, I think a lot more miners are now sufficiently tempted to switch.
