If you can provide a patch that identifies transactional-only Counterparty OP_RETURN transactions uniquely from 80-byte abuse, I will discuss whitelisting it on Eligius with wizkid057.
Counterparty can't default to constructing transactions that are not relayed
by default by the official, vanilla Bitcoin Core software.
Sure it can. Just setup a few nodes dedicated to Counterparty and have your client relay to them by default.