A preliminary amendment filed on the filing date along with the application can avoid excess claims fees. In other words, they filed a continuation that included claims 1-154 (because a continuation is supposed to have all the same stuff that the parent has, and this ensures that there is written description support for the parent's original claims in the child case), but then they amended the claims on the same day to cancel those claims and only present claims 155-175 (21 claims). So they owed us $80 for one excess dependent claim, which they paid.
Also, there are ways to submit third party prior art submissions into an application. You would have until 5/28/2014 (six months after publication) to submit such prior art. There's even a fee exemption if you file only one such submission and it has three or fewer documents listed. This is a much better idea than trying to contact the examiner directly, since they are forbidden from discussing the application with an unauthorized party.