One of the primary points of bitcoin is that anyone can send any amount they want to anyone they want with no busybody middlemen deciding what constitutes a proper and legal transfer.

Someone wants to pay a fee to send dust, that's his business and working as intended.

That's what people seem to keep forgetting. It's not free.

Bitcoin isn't currently practical for very small micropayments.  Not for things like pay per search or per page view without an aggregating mechanism, not things needing to pay less than 0.01.  The dust spam limit is a first try at intentionally trying to prevent overly small micropayments like that.

Bitcoin is practical for smaller transactions than are practical with existing payment methods.  Small enough to include what you might call the top of the micropayment range.  But it doesn't claim to be practical for arbitrarily small micropayments.