1) in the past 4 years I have been paying a small fee and had no problem with my confirmation. a short period of high fees is all your argument?!! and believe it or not there are a lot of things between Coffee and a Car.
regardless of that the high fees have been the result of design, bad decisions, and attacks against bitcoin.
In the past 4 years, ok. But now? If you want to accept Bitcoin in your local store (a fundamental element of the original intentions) it's impossible. It's not a short period. The situation will not improve without doing something.
well currently fees for having a high priority transaction is 5 satoshi/byte which means a normal bitcoin transaction will cost about 10 cents and about 8 cents if you use SegWit. I wouldn't call that impossible.
what we can do is to adopt the solution that was implemented but was opt-in. this solution is Segregated Witness which is also increasing the capacity on top of other things. also to use other solutions (when they were ready). there are on chain scaling solutions like SegWit, Schnorr signature, signature aggregation and possibly even increasing the block size by a little like what SegWit2x proposed.
and also using the second layer solutions which is basically Lightning Network at this point which will be instant and practically free.