Fees are the least of your concerns at this point. I mean it's definitely part of a larger problem, but most of this wouldn't happen if not for the fact that bitcoin's not made to be this massive in the first place. And while you have a point with centralizing bitcoin pools since now they can only be traded in exchanges and nowhere else, the equivalent is pretty much centralization as well, in terms of increasing the size of each bitcoin block which is currently limited to only 1mb (correct me if I'm wrong).
So yeah, at this point I would say we're in a deadlock situation where every option we have leads to centralization of network congestion, and in that regard, I'd be more than happy to choose the lesser destructive option between the two which is just keeping things as it is.
Bitcoin is made for the masses, it's the masses that doesn't understand Bitcoin in the first place. 2009 should be a great year for someone to create something that is capable of competing with Visa and other popular payments platforms and majorly the banks. However, Satoshi made the transaction time cap at 10 minute on the average. He did that because he gave priority to decentralization over any other things and he gave up scalability for it.
There is 3 keys to a great system of cryptography, that's decentralization, speed, and security. You must forgone speed to get decentralization and that's why speed is given and decentralization with security remains the top most prioritize thing in the Bitcoin. You can't do without it if we want full decentralization and if we want speed, it's either we give speed up over decentralization but Bitcoin will never do that, speed will remain like that way.
