Ethereum maximizes the amount of value sent through it at all times.

This may be obvious to others, but I just had a realization about how insanely elegant the gas system is. By raising gas when demand is high, only larger transactions are able to be processed due to the fees eating a smaller percentage of the transaction. While that part is self evident, I realized that Ethereum is optimizing for the most amount of "value" to go through the system at all times given the current limited blockspace.