The situation could have been much better, if some of the mining pools didn't played dirty games. Take a look at the recent blocks which were mined by GB Miners:
https://blockchain.info/blocks/GBMinersThey refused to include the low-fee transactions in their blocks. These people needs to be taught a lesson. They are just too greedy.
no one here actually knows exactly what level of confirmed and unconfirmed TX are there because of the constantly moving chain and the backward hang time that makes it stay where it is.
The backwards hang may be there. Even then, enough evidence exists to prove that miners such as Antpool are not allowing low-free transactions to get confirmed. Because there have been occasions where the block mined by AntPool was around 100KB, and the block mined 2-3 minutes after this block was 999KB.
