Gavin does not seem to understand the economics of the block fee. He says that it doesn't matter if there are room for many or few transactions, but in reality it's the equivalent of a Dutch auction. Nobody has to pay more than the lowest winning bid to enter the block, so nobody really has to pay as long as there is room for all the transactions. Even if there is a cost, the cut off price will most likely be less than 1/20 if there is room for 20x more transactions. Personally I never pay unless I'm in a hurry. Unfortunately this means that a 50% attack will become dirt cheap if the price of Bitcoins continues to go down, and/or the block reward has halved a few more times.

Regarding the previous forks they made the whole community scramble in panic to fix it and get everybody to use the same branch. I really don't understand how they can be used as proof that forks are ok.