A gem from Gavin - keep up the good work (hopefully my rapidly filling up hard drive will be able to last another year).
What I don't understand is why couldn't S. Dice simply broadcast the transaction without including it in a block? The player would have the zero conf transaction popping up notifying him whether he won or lost and there is no "dust"
There is not really an issue though, as the setting is just being made configurable, the only issue is that is is being set not to the previous implicit value of 1 Satoshi, but by default to 5430 Satoshis. Anyone can set it differntly for mining and relaying though, so if you're unhappy, 1-2 lines in your config files are enough. You might need to connect to other lower relaying nodes though and have a path to a lower mining pool/miner, looking at current adoption rates in the network though you might still be fine for quite a while.