I agree that buying coins directly (during the last couple of months) made more sense, not sure how things will work out if the coin market goes flat -- mining may make more sense if we have a couple year flat spell.
I have two minimum ETH contracts w Genesis that I bought with BTC profits. When the market was on the upward trend mining made sense, but I had no idea that the difficulty would increase this rapidly. On April 7, 1 MH/s paid 0.00175158 ETH on June 17, 2 MH/s paid 0.00111374 ETH.
Since that time I split the processing between ETH and ZEC, the ZEC mining is a little more profitable by percent of coin.
As for running my own mining equipment, this was something I wanted to do when BTC was $20, but I can't justify a couple thousand $ now. I will stay with Genesis, concentrating on more obscure coins now, my minuscule ETH payouts will go to promising ICOs.
This morning, Genesis made a payout to my wallet, but did not update the daily transactions since the 22nd (on their ledger).