Yeah don't pay fees. They're a fucking scam and totally not needed. We already have measures in place to stop flooding such as prioritisation of txs. This whole fee business is the mainline client trying to set network policy instead of the miners who run the hardware.
So, you're volunteering to come staff IRC and help people recover their unspendable funds when the priortization leaves their txn unprocessed for weeks, thus locking the inputs?
This isn't speculative, every once in a while some poor sod takes some bad advice given on this form and confuses it for an opinion by someone competent— they get away with it for a few weeks (after all, the overwhelming majority of txn don't get asked to pay any fees) but inevitably they show up on IRC asking for help recovering their wallet and we get to play the hex editing game. Perhaps you're stitting on a stock pile of old inputs which have enough age that it's completely inconsequential for you. Great for you, but you'd also be unaffected by the fees.
This has absolutely nothing to do with miner's fee policy and everything to do with providing software which doesn't invisibly fuck over it's users. Yes, better handling of stuck transactions is important and will reduce the need for the fee safety net, but it's not very clear how to do this without creating other kinds of traps and confusion— thus why no one has submitted patches to handle it yet. But if fees which are applied only rarely and only to TXN which look objectively like DOS attacks and which are less than the rounding error of a typical USD transaction (due to truncation to cents) are a problem for your bitcoin business dealings, then I don't think anyone can help you.
