Mempool have just a few backlogs compared to last couple of months were it experience a lot of bottlenecks because someone is spamming the network to cause traffic and to slow the network down. And as far as the fees, I think its fair that we are paying miners to make our transactions. So in order to "prioritize" it, certain fees must be incurred. This is the reason why we have Segwit to increase the blocksize. To ease the network so that bitcoin transaction can be quick will a minimum fee to pay.