Maybe the high transaction fees problem can we sidestepped by making a clone of Counterparty on a blockchain that uses the same address format as bitcoin so that for each bitcoin address that exact same address works on the other chain; and is merged-mined alongside bitcoin so has a very high difficulty albeit not as high as bitcoin's since not all bitcoin miners do merged mining.

I am thinking of DeVCoin, which admittedly is based on bitcoin code that by now is a little old, but should not be too hard to bring up to date if newfangled features of bitcoin are desired.

-MarkM-