Suggestions have been mooted such as "include a higher fee" and "be more generous", but how does this work in the context of most users? The average person will do what their wallet tells them.
This is way Bitcoin was always meant to work: more fees = faster confirmations; less fees = slower confirmations. At first, when transaction volume was lower, it didn't work that way; most or all transactions were confirmed quickly regardless of fees, and apparently some people were fooled into thinking that was normal, and now that the fee system is working properly, people are complaining that it's broken.
This can easily be fixed by adding an "Urgency" option to the Send Coins tab, allowing users to easily select between "Urgent" and "Not Urgent" transactions, and hopefully showing the expected fee and confirmation time for each option. Average users will easily accept that they can pay more fees to get faster transactions (they already do for things like postage), we just need to make that option more accessible.
In addition, according to CoinMill - the cost of 1 BTC is currently 641.84 USD and a transaction fee of 0.0001 BTC is 0.06 USD (6 cents). 0.0005 (the old fee) is 30 cents. As Bitcoin appreciates (if it does), the cost of transactions relative to the value of a Bitcoin grows substantially.
The fees can be lowered if the price rises too high. They have already been lowered several times for exactly this reason, and there's no reason to think it won't happen again.
EDIT: Typo