What exactly do you refer to by "developers already being pressured to behave in ways that I dare not repeat"? Why and what do you not dare to repeat? Are you under an NDA or what?

With that said, you seem to be forgetting that there is, or at least should be, competition between miners for transaction fees. And while at certain times Bitcoin miners could actually take liberties of choosing which transactions to include in the block they found and which to ignore, this is no longer the case now as the transaction queue is in reasonable limits and most if not all transactions get confirmed pretty fast. And the said is even truer with respect to currencies other than Bitcoin. Their network processing capacities are underutilized, so there is no economic reason for miners to ignore transactions in order to raise the fees as they can't raise them on their own, only indirectly by deliberately choosing not to confirm transactions. But in these conditions skipping certain transactions would mean someone else will include them and receive the transaction fee. Basically, it is the same market laws at work here as everywhere else.