Would the rest of the community still accept the blocks generated with this lower fee?
Yes.
Currently I cannot send anything less than ($1) 0.149BTC without the client adding a 0.01-0.02 BTC (7%) transaction fee.
That's the fault of your client. So long as you send at least 0.00000016 BTC, your fee only needs to be 0.00004096 BTC (assuming a fairly normal transaction size) to be accepted by Eligius (which should easily be within 24 hours).