How would you change the fee, since bitcoin is a P2P network? Does someone go around asking people, "Hey! Stop paying 0.0001 as your tx fee! The meta is now 0.00001!"? Or do we have to switch to a totally different Bitcoin client?
This is all quite confusing to me, as you can see, I'm a mere Jr Member. Enlighten me.
It is complicated because there is no set fee.
Each miner decides which transactions they will include in a block, and the fee paid by a transaction is a major part of the decision. The decision process used by most miners has typically been the one implemented in Bitcoin Core, but I don't think that is the case any more.
Some wallets now look at transactions waiting to be included in the next block and use that information to determine how much of a fee to pay. Currently, Mycellium has been telling me to pay around 0.0002. Blockchain requires the user to enter a fee, and I currently pay between 0.0001 and 0.0005 depending on how important the transaction is. Other wallets might just use a fixed fee set by the developer.