Hi Brian. Thanks for posting your concerns in detail. I found it easier to digest than trying to follow the back-and-forth nature of discussion here.
I agree that the fee thing needs to be sorted out with an eye towards future price appreciation. Unfortunately, I don't think there is a simple solution. Charging fees based on bandwidth usage or size of transaction seemed like an elegant solution when I first heard about it. However, as nxt intends to compete with a variety of financial systems, each with complicated fee structures of their own, I'm concerned that some great nxt services will be "priced out" of the market, while other services will be unnecessarily cheap.
When thinking of nxt as bitcoin in the future, I think the analogy breaks down when talking about fees. Specifically, the future of bitcoin assumes much lower price volatility. Therefore, denominating fees in bitcoin instead of fiat isn't a big deal. For us, we expect high volatility for the near term. Denominating fees in terms of fiat (or gold or any other asset with lower volatility) might make sense in the near term.
With regards to charging fees for placing an order in the asset exchange, I think that there is room for the nxt AE to improve upon the way markets currently work. If you follow nanexllc on twitter (his work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, amongst other publications), you will learn that high frequency trading firms have been abusing the stock markets in the United States. They take profit, and justify this profit by claiming to increase liquidity and lower the bid-ask spread. However, in reality, the displayed liquidity (order book) can rarely be accessed by real trades, and orders often disappear before a counterparty can fill them. I know that setting walls is a strategy for day trading. However, for a wall to be effective, it has to be large. This implies that the fee would be tiny in comparison to the size of the wall.
Additionally, Nanex's recent studies show that the bid-ask spread has not tightened over the life of the current regulation (Reg NMS). Based on these issues in current stock markets, I am suspicious of HFT terrorizing our infant network, and I think that charging fees for placing an order prevents both spam and these predatory trading practices. We aren't designing the AE for the profit of algorithmic day traders.