Summary: The minimum fee needs to be adjustable and probably the best way to accomplish this is via an open market solution - let the miners who are processing the transactions set the fee.
This is precisely what Gavin described in his "State of the Coin" speech at San Jose, and in the pull request on GitHub for 0.8.2.
It's not necessary to convince anyone that this is what should be done because people are already working on implementing it. This entire thread is about to be rendered moot.