The change was done for performance reasons.
I can assure you the box the webserver is running on is one of the fastest in the market, however a many page topic, is straining it at lot, let me explain why.
Whenever a person opens a topic, the database is asked to locate all posts in the posts table (millions) that are with topicID x.
After It fetched these details and stored in memory, you can imagine if you have 100+ pages, think about 500 pages, then there are thousands of posts fetched and stored in memory.
When it has gathered this information it is going to filter this data according to what page you are watching... then send this information to your computer.
The sad truth is that whenever you open a big page topic, reply to it, whatever, every page load is bumping the MySQL database process to 100% CPU for a good second.. mind you that is on a latest Intel Xenon CPU..
Topics with 100 pages, are in my opinion a good limit, they take significantly less CPU load..
Except CPU, the memory usage will be less and overall the site will perform faster..
The problems with remaking your topic were unintended, please send a message to a moderator or me to send you your topic start post contents.
I understand not everyone loves this change, but believe me, it is for the better to keep everything running smooth.
