Before I left for vacation, I submitted a pull request that makes the default policy for miners "more fees == more likely to get into a block." That will be in the 0.7 release (the policy before was mostly "higher priority == more likely to get into a block"), and I've been encouraging the big mining pool operators to implement something similar if they have their own transaction-selection code.
When I get back from vacation I plan on writing code to watch the transactions that do or do not make it into blocks to derive an estimate of the average miners' fee policy, and use that to recommend a reasonable fee to the user.
Those changes will let fees float naturally-- users and miners will form a market and fees will rise or fall based on what users are willing to pay and what miners are willing to accept. I don't like the arbitrary, centralized setting of fees that we've had up until now.