first of all you can never say how long a transaction would take to confirm if you pay a lower fee, that is only an estimation. and also reporting fees in dollar terms has no meaning. fees should be reported in bitcoin (or satoshi) per size (in bytes or kilobytes whichever you prefer) because you are not paying fee based on your amount, but based on the size of your transaction.
for example right now fees are about 2-5 satoshi per byte so i can make a transaction with that much fee but pay a total of $0.02 or $10 depending on the size of my transaction.

secondly for the past 9 years that bitcoin has been around fees were only high for a couple of months for a couple of reasons including some spam attacks against bitcoin network.

Somebody with funds has created a coin that wants to compete against Bitcoin as "the coin". He and his team spawned a lot of bad news on Bitcoin. He may also be the mastermind of the spam attack.
The result is that indeed, many think that Bitcoin is slow and expensive and you better use .. something else. Quite sad.


Quite unlikely for now. For microtransactions there's Lightning Network being deployed, which will may make the fees even smaller and the transactions even faster. But I don't know yet when will LN become highly used...

although fees are also affected by the price but the price is not the main factor changing the fees. but yes it can change if price goes a lot higher and it needs to change.

also you need to know that fees aren't something that someone changes by flipping a switch. fees are what the decentralized network decides. for example right now the majority of the network is running bitcoin core clients and the default setting in bitcoin core is 1 S/B for minimum transaction fees so while you can still send transactions with lower fees they may not be propagated properly because nodes will be rejecting it so it may not even reach the miners.
and then there are miners. since they are the ones putting transactions in blocks so to speak, they can decide the minimum transaction fee. for example they can decide they don't want to accept any transaction unless it is paying at least 100 S/B and they do that sometimes with malicious intents. but the more decentralization of mining can help fix this.

Bitcoin is said to be slow, probably because it is not as they expected, and bitcoin is still very good and profitable for me at a low cost.