I think I've had a lot more experience with variable dice than with pools - only played WoD a few times.
I do like both and they do significantly different things.
Cyberpunk in its raw form has D10s and D6s with the occasional percentile roll on 2 D10s.
My heavily modified house/alternative rule mishmash uses every die type there is and more - mostly to handle varying weapons/combat damage.
For a start, I adopted Rogue's modified calibre damage table which uses variable dice to emulate the damage range of various weapons. Then I applied it to FNFF2013's drops in damage over increasing ranges - which further necessitated changing the dice (drop from 2d6 to 2d4 over distance etc).
When reworking the bludgeon damage, I took the opportunity to use different dice for different attacks - hands, feet, elbows, knees, forehead, short lever, long lever etc - to approximate the different levels of damage each could do.
I also replaced the Hit Location roll with percentile dice to facilitate emulating the percentages given in real data taken from firearms assaults (someone else approximated the same data using D12s but I figured "hey, we can just do straight percentile here") and replaced the task resolution with my own D20 system based on levels of proficiency.
So in my games you can expect to roll anything from a D2 to a D100 depending on what you're doing:
Do you hit him? Roll D20 against your attack skill and apply modifiers vs his D20 and modifiers and defense skill to find out.
Hit him? Cool. Roll percentile to see where. Leg? Dandy. You're using a 9mm at medium range so roll...
Converting all that to a dice pool would mean simplifying a lot - resulting in ridiculously high values for some things - or rolling an inordinately high number of low level dice (or tossing lots of coins, given the lowest die is a d2.) I like keeping division of results to a minimum so I'd take 1D2 over 1D10/5 any day...
I do like the flexibility of variable dice.