Anyway, this seems like a cool thing. My chances of successfully mining are so low it doesn't seem worth leaving my computer on 24/7, so I was feeling disenfranchised. This should fix that.
Thinking about this some more, I guess it helps but it doesn't fix it. If it costs 1 NXT to lease for 22 days, then it is only worth me leasing if I have enough forging power to earn more than 1 NXT in that time. Even if it turns out leasing for longer is possible, the longer the lease period, the less responsive we can be to dishonest pool managers.
Obviously decreasing the fees won't change this, because that would also reduce the forging revenue to be shared. Having a different minimum fee for leasing versus other transaction types would help, but it would set a bad precedent that would quickly become a political nightmare, because every feature would want cheap fees to encourage its use; uniform fees are simpler. It may be that poor people just can't be helped.
However, it seems to me it'd be better if leases ran until cancelled. Then that 1 NXT cost would be ameliorated over a much longer time period. Although being able to cancel a lease looks like a poor deal for the pool, from their point of view it's no different to me creating a new account and transferring my balance to it. From my point of view being able to cancel would save the inconvenience of managing the second account. I doubt people would cancel frivolously, because they lose their forging power for 24 hours each time they do it. So I'm not seeing any obvious drawback to this approach. Was it considered when the leasing feature was designed, and if so, what was the reason it was rejected? I'm new to NXT so no doubt I'm missing something.