Two feature that would be nice for mining pools are (1) Merged Mining ; and (2), especially or only for not-merged-mined coins, an optional setting per coin for the pool to not allocate so much mining power as to increase the coin's difficulty. As there are coins "out there" that are bargains at low difficulty and increasing their difficulty would just make mining them more expensive. So basically have the pool try not to allocate more mining power than is required so that for example coins so low in difficulty that you can earn them even with just a few CPU cores, so that throwing a GPU or ASIC at them would simply drive up the difficulty making it harder to earn the same number of coins, can be quietly farmed in the background while they are cheap, building up stockpiles until stockpiles seem sufficient that it would be worthwhile to start bringing the coin back into the public eye, promoting it, which would tend to attract more miners to it making it less of a bargain to mine.

-MarkM-