The 140ch thing was a gimmic that made twitter go viral. That's all it was. It wasn't even an innovation. Limiting text is certainly no innovation. Twitter is afraid to change it, because it's the very thing that made them different to the point where they did go viral. But it has become so widely used by now that the 140ch limit has become a massive pain in the ass for all of humanity (due to it's pervasiveness) and needs to be changed, BADLY. They are embarrassing themselves and making fools of humanity with everyone becoming expert at abbreviating, and living with the stupid morass.

You probably already know that 140 char limit was a SMS medium restriction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob

It may have made sense to honor the 140 char limit so long as TXTMOB/Twitter served as a SMS gateway, router, aggregator, whatever. But Twitter abandoned that notion early on.

No I didn't know the 140 thing was from SMS. I just remember everybody talking about how ground-breaking it was at the time. Software developers tend to all agree Twitter was never an admirable technology but merely a gimmick that went viral.