Nitrogen is doing what others do to, at least nitrogen allows one free withdraw in 2 weeks, that is good tactic for them. Look at the betcoin, their withdraw fee for money from signature campaign is very high too, participants are complaining. Only one good thing there is they can withdraw using some alt and that's how transactions can be cheaper. I don't blame nitrogen, one of the best places for paying poker this days, I would like they to consider adding some other alts, I would gladly use it, high fees are killing many bitcoin businesses, that is not good.
I agree with you, we can't really blame merchants for the high fees. Bitcoin fees are high, so it's impossible for them to keep them low. They can remove a portion of their profit to cover the fees, and I'm sure they already do that, but they can't solve everything. There are a few things they can do however. One is accepting other alts that have less fees, like litecoin or dash for example. I remember directbet for example even accepted doge in their site. The other thing they could do, would be to start using segwit. I know this would require a lot of coding from their part, and most of these sites don't really have a good dev team that could do this, but they should have enough money to hire some dev and make this change on their platform though.