Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-44043-20121213041002/@comment-3508190-20121214043859

That's all within reasonable limits. You should contact Staff and ask them to increase $wgCategoryPagingLimit for you. Since you have a good idea how many categories would be affected and how much growth you can expect in the forseeable future, you should be able to make a strong case for your request. Your situation is definitely an edge case. Your category tree is too large to neatly fit within the limits. But it's also too small to cause trouble if the limits were raised.

As an addendum to our previous discussions: It is possible to gather the off-page category data with JavaScript and add it to the entry page, but that's slower and more resource-intensive than simply raising the cap. Given the choice staff would surely prefer the latter.