There's a lot of theory here. I've never done any transaction of less than 1 cent, and I don't think I will ever. [...]
That make gambling sites the ones with the most to lose here, but I'm sure they can adapt. Right now, in Las Vegas, you can't play less than a dollar.
No such sites exist, they all have minimum plays larger than the value in question no one has identified any actual currency usage believed to be affected by this.
The outputs impacted this generally cost more to redeem than they're worth... so there is basically no sane reason to create them except to add load to the system.
you are changing the value of very small balances from "economically unspendable" to "practically unspendable". To avoid a perceived hit in public confidence, the Bitcoin Foundation should send up to 5429 Satoshis to every address now containing 1 Satoshi of "dust". (Or whatever amount is necessary to bring every address up to the minimum spendable amount.)
The bitcoin system doesn't have "accounts" every individual payment to you is totally separate as far as the system is concerned. If txout value of X is economically unspendable (meaning it costs you more in fees marginally then it returns) then it's still economically unspendable no matter what other coins you have. You can think of them as coins with negative value: spending it makes you poorer because adding it to your transaction increases that transaction's fees by more than the value of Bitcoin it returns. Giving you _more_ negative value coins doesn't help you productively spend your initial negative value coin.
The dust change doesn't change what you can spend it just changes what outputs you can create no more freaky costs more-to-spend-than-you-get-outputs, unless you can get cooperation from a miner or mine them yourself. For people who have less than that amount in total well, they were already unable to spend them: transactions without any output value of less than 0.01 that doesn't pay a fee of at least 0.0005 BTC is has been non-standard for a long time (and previously required a 0.01 fee).
I can't run a full node full time right now because there is no upload throttling. The Bitcoin client slows my Internet down to literally unusable (4sec+ pings).
If you disable listening (listen=0 in the bitcoin.conf) that works around that pretty much entirely. That is not a replacement for additional flexibility in the long term, but it's really easily done. Things like adjusting client traffic can be twiddled over time, but unspendable data storage outputs are forever. As an aside you might want to google bufferbloat, as it sounds like your local network could use some tuning.