Now devs who know more than me, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think any of these changes are mandatory. If you want, you could run an old version of litecoin-qt (or whatever), or even run your own wallet client thing. The TX fees are not required by the protocol persay, all that was being done was changing the default to accept them in a block and relay them...if I understand it correctly, you could mine blocks and not enforce ANY transaction fees, and no one could stop you.

The transaction fees are decided by the miners -- the miners could have rejected coblee's changes by not using the new version, and he couldn't have done anything. He produced a fix which most people think will work, so they switched over.