Number of unconfirmed ones is decreasing significantly. It was almost 250k and now it's just above 100k transactions. This is a good sign for bitcoin. I don't think unconfirmed transactions make the price go up.
Even now the fees is quite high. The minimum fee now is going at around 200 Sat/B, which is still about 10x higher than the normal rates (the rates which we had 6 months back). For an average sized transaction, you need to pay around $8 as fee, which is still quite high (although much lower than the $20 per transaction fee which we had a few days back).