Well, if the Beta forums had never been spammed to hell and back by over-zealous testers we wouldn't be in this mess here either (the spam and flaming on the Beta forum really was bad, and SE added similar posting restrictions there to try and bring some order to the chaos, and thus then later added such restrictions here on the official forum when ARR launched as well, probably in an attempt to head off a repeat happening here). 'This is why we can't have nice things' and all that.

Sure the posting limit can be annoying, but how hard is it to copy the whole post, trim it down to a few sentences, then go back and edit in the rest? It at least makes you think about what you're saying rather than posting 'off the cuff' (although I admit it doesn't stop that entirely, something even I've been guilty of at times).