This is a n issue that need to be resolved sooner or later. Memory & CPU usage has to be contained. Its like the debt problem how much of it you will allow before everything becomes inefficient & breaks. We better solve it now rather than kicking the can down the road. We have gone from 100 MB to 700 MB in a year and half. Bitcoin is centralizing due to this. They have put out something in latest release that allows people to store only last 500 MB (or more but 500 MB is minimum) of blocks only because its impossible to change the blockchain from that far behind. We have to look at such a solution or some other way of reducing both HDD & RAM usage. Otherwise it becomes a decision of how much resources (RAM, CPU, Internet Bandwidth, Power etc) are you willing to invest to get few dollars every week. We need to root out the inefficiency.