i hate to bring up an analogy from medicine since it may not be appropriate but i'll try nonetheless.

one of the greatest things i learned during my internship btwn med school and residency in eyes, is that too much intervention can cause problems for patients.  every 3 mo i'd rotate onto a new ward with responsibilities for about a couple of dozen gorked out patients.  i say gorked out b/c invariably all of them had at least a dozen meds onboard for a variety of reasons most of which had to do with sedation, pain, or anti-anxiety.  problem was, these meds unbeknownst to their previous physicians were preventing these ppl from getting better.  this was a repeating problem.  so the first thing i would do would be to cocentrate on stripping off as many of these unnecessary meds as possible.  much to everyone's amazement, these pts would perk up, turn around and start walking again, interacting with staff, feeling better, be more alert, and generally just get better to the pt i could discharge them.  and this experience happened over and over for me.  twas a great personal accomplishment for me and one i will never forget; don't over do it.

pt being, i still think the block size cap is the fundamental problem here.  more rules and limits that core dev piles on simply complicates the code and makes it more complex.  if anything, we should be stripping off rules and limits so that the free mkt can come to bear on many of these problems we are currently seeing.  the miners and users are perfectly capable of regulating the size of blocks and fees on their own.  if we lift the cap, the spam can actually help the network.  as long as spammers have to pay fees any spam attempts will line the pockets of miners and go back to growing the hashrate.  that would be a good thing and the last thing the spammers want to do.  no doubt they will try at first so we should expect even greater higher level attacks initially but in the long run, they will die off.  that's b/c their real objective is to disrupt new user growth which w/o a cap will be short circuited.  any further spam then will just help the tx mkt to grow, miners to profit, and yes, full nodes will eventually develop their own fee mkt too.  yes, full node capacities will have to grow but that should be viewed as a good thing b/c on the other end that will mean that miners are prospering (which is ok Greg) and user growth will be skyrocketing along with the price.  more merchants will come on board with new user growth and they will want and probably have a fiduciary responsibility to run their own full nodes which will add to network capacity.

so strip off rules and limits within reason, not add, and let BitcoinRun!