It wasn't written for the janitor at Twitter, rather it was for people outside Twitter who want to think about what might be coming next. Yes, it is obvious. The idea was taken straight out of Facebook. I thought people would benefit from seeing what it would look like in action. As developers it's easy for us to imagine it, but even we need to mock things up to get a look at it, to help think better about it.
i think my main point is that the display mechanism must be the least of the concerns with respect to introducing > 140 characters. that is to say- I don't believe anyone thinks it's an aesthetic impossibility.
it seems fruitless to dictate "how" without being part of the "why and why not" discussions.
my favorite part of tweetstorms is the compartmentalization of ideas and arguments. if a point in the story is 50 chars, its 50 chars with a break point. if its 100, let it be 100. making the story one string feel like reading long text, whereas breaking it down feels more comfortable to me.
but this is all subjective, and that website's design is pretty sleek :)
This is an interesting point - my first thought was isn't this solved with paragraphs, that can obviously be variable lengths? But what about favourites and retweets - I disagree with you that it's easier to read parts as separate tweets than paragraphs would be, but the UI to retweet or favourite a paragraph seems awkward and I think those functions on parts of a tweet storm are important.
That also raises the question of whether a paragraph should be restricted to 140 characters (assuming that's the see more limit) so it doesn't create a see more tweet itself when retweeted, not sure whether that matters.
i know Dave deserves respect but if i was even a janitor at Twitter this post would piss me off.