Will we ever receive a response? Will the unconfirmed transactions ever go through? Will we ever receive our $20k transaction sent to an old address of ours? Who knows. Only Ben knows and he is nowhere to be found today, it seems.
The transaction will eventually go through. If you would like to speed it up,
Luke-jr, the owner of the
eligius.st mining pool has a way to prioritize a specific transaction.
You can PM him on the forums and ask for his help.
As for blockchain.info not including a fee, I'm sure Ben will look into it and get it resolved.