I've been really frustrated by the slow confirmation times too. I really hope the devs figure out something soon that will solve this problem. Hopefully something that will allow fast confirmations times and still be relatively cheap.
They have, at least the core devs. Core has a well working fee estimate for quite some time now. The most recent addition was the option to increase the fee of a unconfirmed transaction (opt-in replace by fee),but its not part of the GUI yet.
That is not a solution. All that does is cause more network traffic (from people rebroadcasting new RBF transactions), making transactions more expensive for everyone, and *maybe* making "stress test"-like "attacks" more expensive. Raising fees is not going to allow more transactions to fit in a single block.
Well yes, the underlying question is whether we assume that all "legit" transactions still fit into a 1 MB block or if the network is under attack (again). Judging from the analysis a few people posted, the vast majority of the transactions causing the hold up currently pay a 2 satoshi per byte fee. RBF (when implemented into the GUI) can help to retroactively increase the fee of a "stuck" transaction. It is just a band aid solution, bigger blocks will be needed regardless.
I would consider it a deflection when the current backlog of transactions are not "legit" transactions.
The Bitcoin protocol considers any transaction with a valid signature (for that specific transaction), and that only spends outputs that have not yet been spent in a previously confirmed transaction to be "legit" (valid).
The nodes will generally be a little bit more restrictive in that they will often not relay transactions that are "non-standard" (but will rely blocks that contain non-standard transactions) -- e.g.: contain outputs that are all below a certain threshold in size, contain a "high"
"k" value signature, double spends another unconfirmed transaction in a node's mempool (this would not fit the definition of 'non-standard'), among other reasons.
When the backlog of transactions will get high (as it was recently), the blockstream core devs, and their fanboys, will claim that transactions when one entity sends BTC to itself that the transaction is not "legit" (and they will assume that the backlog is due to these transactions, yet do not provide proof, or even evidence that the backlog of transactions is due to one or more entities sending a large number of transactions to themselves). However there may be a number of business reasons that a reasonable person may find reasonable that an entity may send a large number of transactions to itself.