Well, first off, the interface is the same as 0ch's, and 2ch gets orders of magnitude more traffic and people use it just fine. Of course, a lot of them use special browsers, so that sort of throws things off.
Second, I seem to recall that I implemented about half of the code to support multiple pages, futaba-style, in mode_message, but never finished it. I think that basically all that would be needed is hacking the template to include links to previous and next pages for the front page. I think Futaba's text boards implement something like it. Right now, though, I'm not sure I can find the time to do it. If anybody wants to try, though, I'd be more than happy to include the code.
There are no SQL queries. You need to change the page generation mode to paged, like mode_image uses, and use some <if> statements in the template to detect this and add the appropriate links as needed.
If it's a simple matter of hacking the template file, I can handle that in a speedy fashion. I guess I'll use the mode_image template as a functional model.