Pooling, continued

I've gone through extraordinary measures, and this is what I've ended up with. I'm literally working myself into a sweat (why, oh why am I knitting with a wool/alpaca mix during the hottest heat wave of the year so far?) and I'm afraid it still looks like crap, nevermind the amount of yarn I must be wasting by trying to stagger the yarn and pooling.

This is what it looked like before (the cast on edge at the bottom, the more recent "let's try to avoid pooling" part at the top):


So is it an improvement? I can't tell. I think I'm blind, at this rate.