Fundamentally, spam is about leveraging very low marginal cost situations to multiply very low marginal benefits, so the necessary fee might be incredibly low.
On the user-specified threshold, it might slow down the emergence of someone with good ideas, but my guess is that most of us would have very low thresholds. On the other hand, I can imagine that there are some relatively big fish who might be more interested in using nostr if they can set a higher level and make engagement more remunerative.