Tl;Dr: I sent the same amount 0.05 btc from the core wallet a couple of days ago, paid about $7.5 and it took about 20 minutes to get 1 confirmation and not much longer to get to 6.

The default fee at the beginning was 6 confirmations/ under an hour for about $80+. I changed it to 12 confirmations because wasn't in a hurry, and it went down to ~$38 I reckon.

Anyway I kept "playing" with the prices, and they kept changing. I was actually more worried about sending with a too low fee - I've done it a few days before and it was stuck, so I dropped the transaction and tried again.

What I found out (at least that's my theory, and it's when using the core wallet dunno about other wallets) is that 1. The fees the wallet gives before sending are not the final fees. For me, every time I tried the final fee was much lower - which caused me some troubles with the first transaction. 2. I'm pretty sure, but haven't actually tried it, that when the sender is paying the fees it's cheaper and/or faster than when the receiver does. 3. But it might have been the bad timing - first transaction, accidentally obviously, was exactly when there was a flood of small transactions with minimum to no fees, that stuck everything up.

So basically I think the fud regarding the fees is pretty much that. Fud. Not trying to say the core doesn't have problems etc., just that it's not as bad as some are making it seem. And have been around btc for a while, more than seven years, so trust me I know how not perfect it is...