It has been almost 3 months since cryptocurrency I have been working on adopted new block validation rules. As I mentioned in the previous post, the new rules could cause quite long gaps between two consecutive blocks, but that the network would recover faster than with standard rules. Longest gap so far has been about 1 day due to decision that we will not make dummy transactions every time network activity drops to no transactions in last hour.
After setting block maturity to 10 blocks (minimum possible, block rewards unlock after 10 confirmations) on my pool and payment interval to 4 minutes (same as block target time), the network has been almost self-sustaining as long as at least one pool is online and solving new blocks.
As mentioned in the previous post, the new validation rules discourage solo mining, but it is possible to solo mine blocks as long as there is still transactions waiting in memory pool due to difficulty being a lot lower than with standard validation rules.