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.
The fee is not fixed. In the core client, there is recommended fee, such as 0.0001btc/kB. But you do not have to pay that. You can choose your fee. In the busy times, it is better to pay higher fees to get faster confirmation. In the not so busy times, you can reduce the fee to lower than the recommended fees and can still get confirmed.
Mycellium wallet asks me what priority I want to use when I want to send a transaction. If I remember well, there are 4 or 5 priorities, like Low, Economy, Normal, High. Fees are really different, but I haven't noticed if they are hard coded into the app nor I have noticed if they are changing by the amount or peak time. I usually use Economy because fee is nearly 0 but in a little time my transaction is always becomes confirmed.