IMO it's a waste of time going for a pilot's license just to be exempt until the new rules come out in a year or so. By the time you spend 10K and get the license, you won't need it anymore. IMO you should just conduct your business within AMA safety rules for now and claim you are flying for fun or practicing to help a friend out with his house. If someone complains, just be polite and move on. I had to fly a site in NYC and asked the local NYPD precinct if they would have a problem with me flying a drone on private property. The answer I got was that they (the NYPD) had no specific rules on their books and they didn't care unless it was jeopardizing public safety. I may have just been lucky that day and a call to a different precinct may have yielded a different answer (I suspect it all depends on who answers the phone). So I'm pretty sure if you aren't bothering anyone or doing something stupid and dangerous, nobody is going to make a fuss about flying without an exemption for a private fee. (Yes it's commercial, but I consider any business I conduct to be a private matter.) I have to believe a lot of individuals (and maybe some companies) are doing the same but are keeping a low profile. Again, just my opinion.
And I'm sure the FAA just threw that Pilot's license requirement in there for now to make an exemption useless with out it -- so they wouldn't be inundated with exemption requests.