Re: no comfirmations with fee

-snip-
It will help a lot the people to set the "correct" fee for each transaction. More info here :

- http://blog.bitcoinfoundation.org/floating-fees-for-0-10/

Yes, I like the feature, but I doubt it will have impact on the masses as its only affecting bitcoin core/qt for now.

Judging from the source though the default setting is still to sort by priority first.

This appears to only occur if until the size of the high priority transactions reach a limit set in the configuration:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/miner.cpp#L120-L123
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/miner.cpp#L222

If -blockprioritysize is not set (or is set less than or equal to 0), then the transactions will all be sorted by fee and priority will be ignored for fee paying transactions.

Which makes this even more a race to higher fees, at least at times. I doubt that the higher max block size limit will solve this though.