Whether it allows you to send a tx with no fee, depends on how many BTC you want to send (the more, the better) and when you received the coins that you are spending (the sooner, then better).
right I get that part. although I sent .4 recently and pretty sure
I was forced into clicking ok for a fee on that as well. Thought the limit was lower but not the real point..
Where is the easy option to send a 5 dollar donation without getting hit with a tx fee using the QT client?
Wait longer.
High priority tx = priority > 57,600,000. That is roughly one bitcoin day. If you receive one bitcoin and wait one day you can "spend" some or all of it without waiting.
Low priority txs = Everything else. Even if you change your client, by default other clients will refuse to relay tx which are low priority and do no meet the min fee requirements. So understand the client is just preventing you from doing something which would result in coins being "stuck" for days or potentially forever because it won't let you create what it knows it and other clients won't relay.
What was wrong with the old way?
There is no "old way". It has always worked this way. In the past you likely had larger value and older outputs ("coins") and thus could optionally send without a fee as a high priority txs. Nothing has changed other than the min fee has been reduced a couple times, and some other restrictions have been removed (not added).
