[crazygringo]

Ultimately this is a bit of a rant about why MySQL didn't bother changing the TIME type to support an elegant maximum value of 1,024 hours instead of 838.

But, seriously? Who cares? It's not even close to an extra order of magnitude of range. The type is obviously meant to be used for time values that have a context of hours within a day, supporting a few days as headroom... so supporting 1,024 instead of 838 is pointless -- if you're getting anywhere even close to the max value, you probably shouldn't be using this type in the first place.

And yes, it's probably best not to change it for backwards compatibility. Can I imagine a case where it could break something? No, not off the top of my head. But it probably would break some application somewhere. And for such a widely deployed piece of critical foundational infrastructure, being conservative is the way to go.

Nothing about this seems WTF at all, except for the author's seeming opinion that elegant, power-of-two ranges ought to trump backwards compatibility with things that probably made sense at the time.