Where did you get the "because fees are still $0.4-$0.5"?
Maybe he's using the web wallet from blockchain. The wallet sometimes suggests you to send a miner fee of 0.00027 btc ($0.45) I stopped trusting their recommended fees because sometimes my transaction size could be above 500bytes.
http://prntscr.com/f4d4tpYes, that could be the case, I have similar experience with blockchain wallet. But on the other hand ignoring recommend fees could lead to problems with transactions confirmation. Although if you look at today's numbers there are so much unconfirmed transactions, seems there is some problem with Blockchain again, no matter the amount of fee.