Hi Scotcoin,
Transaction costs are only charged by Bitcoin because the miners must be paid to validate transactions.
There’s no particular “Counterparty transaction fee”, it’s only a matter of making sure transactions get processed by Bitcoin.
There are some recommended values to make sure transactions do get processed (e.g. the fees must be higher than the commonly discarded sub-dust amount of 5430 satoshis).
You can set your own (higher or lower) if you run your own service.
https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterparty-lib/search?utf8=✓&q=DEFAULT_FEE_PER_KB&type=Code
DEFAULT_FEE_PER_KB = 10000 equals 0.0001 BTC and you probably can’t get away with less than 0.00005430 BTC (and of course if you pay 0.0001 BTC or more, transactions will get processed faster).
On Reddit you can find reports of experiments done by people whose cheap transaction fees delayed transactions by more than a day.
Regarding various approaches: you can see this discussion for more details on the currently achievable transaction processing costs and ideas for lowering the frequency of payouts by withholding payouts for a period of time (say a week or whatever).