This has become a hot topic of conversation, not only on forums but at my place several friends have complained about high fees.

Imo it is quite reasonable that high fees make people reluctant to spend more than they would have to pay for a small transaction. Then for hodlers this further strengthens them not to sell their bitcoins. It's better to just use another payment method, because no matter what, up to now there is no solution to overcome the transaction congestion that has occurred. There needs to be some new ideas that need to be offered to miners but we haven't seen them yet. Another large-scale impact may be its adoption to become a global payment method making bitcoin currently increasingly avoided.