And that, my friend, is the crux of the problem. Unfortunately I don't really have the technical expertise to do this analysis, but I would love to see some analysis of median value transacted vs. transaction size, generally, on the blockchain.... with the approach in mind that there ought to be a threshold under which we are content not (reliably) relaying transactions (i.e. most nodes refuse to relay them while under significant mempool load).

Ideally, those making uneconomical (default unspendable) transactions ought to be penalized, and considerably so, in order to prevent the cost of their transactions from being socialized. One approach is obviously to allow block size to grow limitlessly (virtually or literally). The question, then, is whether this is a) responsible, and b) necessary (are there alternatives?)