I obviously don't want to pay the $1000 fee. And yes, I understand the smaller transactions will cost a bit more. That's why I'd like to understand how this "Minimum .1 BTC fee" works. What is the cutoff, how can it be changed/worked around.

And I was hoping to do it without rawtransactions, which I am familiar with but don't feel comfortable using.

Can someone explain the ".1 BTC Minimum fee" and the exact mechanics - surely it's in the code somewhere. And yes I'd call it a bug that it overrides user set fee without warning from the normal command line send.

Thanks for the responses.