ViaBTC gets grouped because of Jihan's relations with them, even though he's no longer with Bitmain. It's not based on any direct evidence I've seen though and ViaBTC has been doing their own things.
this is good news as it means Antpools friends are all smaller pools
To my estimate they're often smaller than (equal to on a really good day) Foundry.
Even though there's not a close-to-50% issue that I have seen real evidence for, there's definitely a pool (block template) centralization issue; there has been for over a decade. Hopefully, Ocean will open source DATUM fully (not just the client-side) and with some pool operators working on stratumv2... there's hope.
DATUMfully (not just the client-side) and with some pool operators working onstratumv2... there's hope.