High fees discourage usage true however I believe we should work with the network and user base we have and not the one we hope to one day obtain.

If all block rewards were removed today each transaction would I believe cost around 27 dollars to maintain our current level of security. Now even if we were to grow our user base by 10 fold it would not be enough to maintain our current level of security after block rewards are removed. A compromise is in order, hardware and connection costs need to come down or our security level must drop or our user base needs to grow by 100 fold. Again a compromise is needed.
In 15 weeks the incentive to not attack the network will be cut in half. We should be prudent and assume our user base will shrink and node count will shrink. If people want to use alt coins or side chains that's their choice it won't matter if Bitcoins network receives less in total fees when the fees would otherwise have been insufficient anyways.

If my options are a large network with high resource demands and insufficient funds to cover security needs and a small network with high fees but secure and stable I'll take the high fees.

You giga block supporters are naive if you think Bitcoin can grow by 100 fold in the next 15 weeks or 1k fold in 4 years. We simple do not have enough users to support low fees at this time.  

You would trade long term security and stability for a slightly larger user base? Why?  And I never said I wanted a 5 dollar transaction fee; 10 cents to 50 cents might be enough.