We know it will handle 8MB, but what about 32MB? I'm pretty sure most of the miners have not updated to 32 and we will have many 8MB blocks before we reach bigger one.
Even if they don't mine 32MB blocks, if they still will accept 32MB blocks. Miners have the incentive to mine all the transactions they possibly can (fees).
But that incentive is then co-related with the fears that their bigger block could lost propagation race and be orphaned. I also think miners will not jump to 32MB blocks right away.
Certainly could be the case. Don't have the volume at this point to test the theory one way or the other at this point. We will get there though (probably after another max increase).
At this time the incentive is the block reward. Fees so far are irrelevant. That is why Bitcoin has to scale, we need adoption and use cases once the block reward will go down.
The reward goes up if the price goes up too. I do fully agree with what you said, regardless. 1 million tx's paying 1 penny is 10K. 1 billion pennies is 10MM dollars.