Yeah, Vitalik has already commented on how even after the current scaling plans are implemented the fee may stabilize near where it currently is, or higher.

I think people forget why the fees are so high- Ethereum is over capacity- there are more people trying to transact than can. Demand greater than supply. This causes a bidding war to get your transaction added. So, if everyone decided they were willing to pay $30.... the fee wouldnt be $30. It would go up until people are priced out. Same in reverse - if people weren't willing to pay the fee it would drop until they were (or demand got below supply, in which case it would plummet back to pennies).

So while ETH has plans to scale, which will temporarily lower fees... the idea is that would onboard new users and uses. Until you rehit the wall, and fees reenter bidding war.

So that's where the layer-2s come in. You can make temporary tradeoffs of security and decentralization to get cheap scalability before bulk confirming on the base layer. Similiar concept to temporarily sending your coins to a centralized exchange for a trade before pulling back out- except that layer-2s aren't making nearly the same level of compromise.

Then of course you have interoperability that Hive account@taskmaster4450le likes to write about. This provides a... layer-3? layer-0? What would be a good symbol to use for layer-Emergent? The cryptosphere itself provides an antifragile ecosystem for us to operate in.