$0.25 as a miner fee for sending $575 worth of bitcoin?
The amount being sent is irrelevant to the fee. The same fee could be required for $1 worth of Bitcoin depending on the transaction size.
With the network congestion there's no way of avoiding those fees and provide a decent service, if you cut on fees you'll end up with huge delays in transaction confirmation or no confirmation at all.
No, there is very little network congestion primarily due to spam. You don't know how to properly use it, as in properly set up the right fees.
The most likely reason for the fee to be in that range, is your transaction being in the higher Bytes regions.
It primarily comes down to the recommended satoshis/byte fee. People that are wasting time with faucets and other nonsense that constantly pays out little amounts are the ones that are to blame for the huge UTXO set. Their transactions are usually bigger that average/normal.