This almost sounds like a case of Stockholm syndrome.

I use Twitter. The 140 character limit is definitely not a feature. In addition, they could be tokenizing mentions and hashtags to save space (e.g., as a Unicode private use point followed by a 64-bit int).

When you see the amount of XML crap that is included with every tweet, the artificial limitations imposed seem all the more laughable. (See: http://www.slaw.ca/2011/11/17/the-anatomy-of-a-tweet-metadat...)