I'm not sure in what sense you mean "maximizing transactions."
I mean it from many different scopes, even including how to get the coin into spenders' hands at wide scale.
Yes there is an observed correlation, but I don't believe that increasing junk transactions would in and of itself increase market cap.
I agree
normally I don't think it would because DoS has a cost and stopping DoS has a cost too.
As far as the recent fee increase, that is rather interesting (not sure whether relevant to your point or not, assuming you have one). By increasing the fee by a factor of 20 we decreased transactions by about 28% (ignoring the period of obvious abuse) as can be viewed here:
http://monerochain.info/charts/transactionsInteresting to see some quantification of the costs involved. Thanks for sharing.
Edit: 20X increase may only be impacting
smallerlower value transactions if it is a nominal and not a percentage tx fee? I assume it must be nominal otherwise very small tx amounts become a form of bloat DoS.