I actually think the increased hashrate is causing the difficulty to rise, causing fewer and smaller payouts for everyone involved. I hope people stop trying to mine and buy bitcoin on the exchanges, it's more profitable and if fewer people mine, then the difficulty can actually decrease, to keep the generation time at 600 secs. The more people mine, trying to strike it rich, ignoring the market value, it will just cause stagnation of the price and inflation of the difficulty. If people buy the coins and hold them the worth would go up and the difficulty would become manageble and profitable. I do think it's great that there is increased interest in mining but only with moderation will anyone actually benefit from bitcoin's popularity.