(*) the fee for each transaction proposed was removed after I left btcex because it was really insane. I was trying to understand their UI, adding proposals and canceling them when I realized that, each time, I was loosing money.
As I can see in my payments history all payments (except the last one) were without any fees (I was paying Yandex.money to purchase bitcoins). It was the easiest way to get any bitcoins and there was only Yandex.money transaction fee for this chain of payments.
But indeed there are some new fees were introduced lately. As you described the transaction fee, I would agree that it looks terrible. Maybe I am just lucky that I had no bad experience with the service, thanks for warning. It probably would be better for all to have a fees that will be enough to pay for hosting and time spent on keep the service running.
There is no evidence that DDOS was supported by btcex, although he publicly announced that he would like this to happen (e.g. if community will approve by donating it). As we know community did not approve

BTW when community approves, DDOS does look so unethically for some people (like I heard some was saying that DDOSing Mastercard for blocking Wikileaks donations was ok).
However there is a point in this story. In a real world all stock exchange have some kind of regulations from authorities and suspicious actions can be investigated. It is not the case in the anonymous virtual currency world. If mtgox owner or any of his friends would like to make additional profit from trades on his service, he might have some advantage as the owner of the service. As long as there will be no evidences, we will have to live with that.