2) The fee drop which isn't working because miners aren't upgrading to Bitcoin Core 0.9 whilst other users are. This is partly my fault, but is mostly due to the totally broken fee market. According to nice and simple economic theory, mining is competitive and miners are supposed to include all transactions no matter what the fee is, because if they leave money on the table, some other miner will grab it. So fees are supposed to be used only for load control. In fact mining is not competitive at all because of pooling and it seems the handful of people who control mining have collectively decided not to allow lower fees, because it's become a real profit centre for them, so they're playing "who blinks first" with wallet authors.
As you should know every transaction you include increases your orphan rate. Prior to the v0.9 fee drop transaction fees were probably already low enough that adding transactions to your blocks actually cost you money, based on careful measurement and analysis done by myself and others; lowering them by another order of magnitude definitely put them below that limit. FWIW I've spoken to some mining pools and large mining operations who have also told me this was their reason for rejecting the 0.9 fee drop.
After all, why risk orphaning a block, worth ~$16,000 USD, when an entire block full of v0.9 transaction fees is only worth $6.50 USD? If they're "leaving money on the table" they sure as hell aren't leaving much.
