Cool blog post! Interesting info, and I end up learning about some neat tools.
May I ask why exactly people want to move away from the page limit?
I fear that a word limit (assuming that the page limit is no more) could encourage authors to overload the paper with figures, in opposition to prepare useful appendices or online material, like nice blogs or lab’s project pages ;). I wouldn’t like to come across a 15-page, 4000 words full of images.
I really like the second suggestion, though. It helps a lot for reference readability: authors don’t need to abbreviate everything or suppress information to fit the references.