As for transaction submission, most Eligius servers (*.eligius.st) will accept a P2P connection on a public bitcoin node that will accept the transactions, which has been sufficient for most since before and after I disabled the never-really-supported pushtx page that was being abused.
I'll have to try that, as well as try to find that updated description of what transactions are accepted.
There are a lot of transactions where I'd be happy to send a small fee. But $0.20+ to transfer $2.50 between wallets (where I control both ends so I don't really care about the speed or double-spend security of the transaction) is too much.