There was no soft-fork for the 250kB default block-size limit.
Currently the fees are very, very, very far from being anywhere near of an amount sufficient to secure the network.
We're all having a free lunch right now, due to coins still being minted, but if that was to stop tomorrow, the network would be in an extremely shitty state.
But shouldn't the goal be to encourage activity and number of txs, so those small fees could cumulate into more significant rewards?