Meanwhile, to drive the price down so someone can buy a bunch of BTC, they can flood the blockchain with tiny transactions and make it "bothersome" for miners.
I am not a miner and have not been following them, but has there been some huge uproar from the miners saying that they are super bothered by all of the tiny transactions? There are ASIC machines coming out that can do 60 MH/s, are they going to be worthless because of so much "dust"?
I have not seen a huge exodus of miners fed up with the amount of traffic.
Those actually mining are not 'peers' in the supposedly peer-2-peer system per-se. Transfer nodes are, and yes, there have been an exodus of these due to bloat and overhead. It is quite possible to render these almost completely outside of the reach of all non-commercial participants depending on how things evolve. How much of a problem that is depends on where one stands in the Bitcoin ecosystem from a philosophical and/or monetary investment standpoint.