We are quickly approaching 1-2 sat/Byte BTC transaction fee area. Not there yet, still in 2-5 sat/B zone, but can easily happen tomorrow. This means that tomorrow some 0 fee transactions may be quickly accepted by miners. Insane when you remember where we where two weeks ago.
Unfortunately, most of the pools are set up to ignore 0 fee transactions and not include them in a block. Also, I suspect that Bitcoin.com, F2Pool and maybe Antpool have set things up to ignore transactions with slightly higher fees than that as well. However, the situation is vastly improved. there are some transactions that have been stuck since November that are clearing. (Although I supect many of these are indeed spam.)
Getting low-fee or zero-fee transactions confirmed seems like an attainable goal. For example, by imposing a penalty on block reward for mining significantly underfilled blocks when the mempool has many transactions waiting. I understand there's an issue with timing. Maybe just "old" mempool transactions could count - say, only those that have been waiting more than 2-3 blocks. The penalty would be added as a bonus to the next
full block, in order to preserve planned inflation. Several constants to tweak, but I think it could be done. This is a minor issue, however: no one is going to cry if If 0-fee txs get dropped.
My pet problem is more serious - getting rid of spam as much as possible. Avoiding tx censorship and fighting spam are fundamentally opposite goals, unfortunately. Core defined a threshold for dust transactions exactly in order to fight spam.
Whats merit standing for ? 
