[mousetraps]

I posted this in the comments in the blog as well:

With regards to the technicalities of max_path itself... the issue is with the .NET file I/O API, which doesn't allow you to use \\?\ paths to work around it, and is too big for our team in particular to do much about. Here's a good article that might provide a little more context (it's a little old, and these "plans" they speak of never actually materialized.)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bclteam/archive/2007/02/13/long-path...

That said... we don't like it either, and we are still thinking about what we can do.