Agree with your comments.
As a long term supporter of Cardano, I watch IOHK youtube videos, Charles AMAs, Lars explaining protocol parameters and of course detailed explanation from people like Umed (Sky light pools)
I think this level of knowledge is sufficient to run a pool operation. Technical team is always focused on their knowledge on protocol design which is based on scientific papers. Not all people have the knowledge or capability to understand everything written in the scientific papers. Lets accept these facts. Still we all are trying to contribute in whatever roles possible based on our skills.
Anyway my focus was never on protocol. I started this topic to highlight the issues faced currently due to adapools.org features… 
yes a0 value doesn’t have any significance now. I felt IOHK want to support technical teams/community members running stake pools currently to get some ADA rewards initially and then increase the a0 value…so that there will dedicated people…may be that is why a0 influence on pool desirability is not significant currently…this is just my opinion 
I just noticed this for the first time as well. If you sort that column by decreasing ROA, you get three pools at the top (all assigned abysmal # rank) who were lucky enough to produce a block from a very low stake. The ROA heading also says 30d indicating a 30 day average.
I remember from watching the ITN (as a latecomer to Cardano who missed the snapshot) that once in a while a small pool would generate anomalous rewards, and I assume this is what happened here. You can see how Adapools blanks out this disproportionate reward with an Unknown label. That could be due to the pool’s age being less than 30 days, or being characterised as such an anomaly… they don’t say, at least not on the spot.
In any case even that temporary boost in popularity, that “15 minutes of fame” attracting attention so badly needed today by the small pools, is eliminated. Those 3 small pools visible now with their anomalous ROA being censored show Costs between 17 and 24%, exactly as described in the OP. All in all, Adapools couldn’t do a better job preventing the little guys from establishing themselves if they were beating them off with a stick.
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To be honest with you, I did not dive into the hardcore formula parts of the Shelley specs. Most of it is written in plain English and perfectly accessible to anyone who is willing to … read. 
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Fair statement. I agree. We all are learning by different means. I used to read IOHK blogs but when it comes to formulas … I just ignore as I cannot understand them.
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Great dialogue! Thank you for bringing up this topic!
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Hello together,
i am also preparing to get my pool ready and ensure that ppl get to know it. Getting comfortable with adapool.org and pooltool.io are necessary steps. My initial question was: “What do i need to do to present my pool as the reliable and secure pool it is ?”.
After reading through these posts, my picture of adapool.org is negatively biased now, as it seems like it favors big and grown pools over new pools.
The question now changed to: “Is it even possible to attract enough new people before they jump onto a bigger pool” ?
From 1044 entries on adapools.org 800 of them showing a Cost of 7.83% to 100% (to be fair: 100% does not happen often.
Lets assume we have the following Pools:
Pool a: 3% fee, +340 ADA cost, 2.24M Staked, 500k Pledged
Pool b: 0% fee, +340 ADA cost, 2.24M Staked, 500k Pledged
Pool c: 3% fee, +340 ADA cost, 51,29M Staked 120k Pledged
Pool d: 0%fee, +340 ADA cost, 5.13M Staked 500k Pledged
The Cardano-Delegation-Reward-Calulator returns the following numbers:
Pool a: 0.0876%
Pool b: 0.095%
Pool c: 2.8677%
Pool d: 2.8425%
For a pool to be successfull it needs at least 5M ADA staked to it. Even if it runs with 0% fees at the beginning it only returns only a fraction of a pool beyond 5M ADA. The 700 of the 1024 pools listed on Adapools.org which have more than 13.92% costs shown perform bad in terms of ROA.
From 1045 entries on adapools.org 700 of them showing a Cost of 13.92% to 100%
How does this fit into the picture of a decentralized network, in which the multiples should be favoured before the ones.
Due to the fact that adapools.org shows where you get the most rewards, peple will delegate to the pools which already have 5M+ ADA. If this practise continues there is less room for new pools. New pools will come, will get frustrated and leave.
We have to work on that, to attract ppl to delegate to new pools also.
