1) This breaks the API, which makes it unlikely to be accepted as-is.
No it doesn't. Existing queries will keep on working (as explained in the first post).
It is not 100% backwards compatible.
2) It is such a small amount of information, I do not see the difficulty in querying up to max-count.
As it is today if i have thousands of transactions and want to view the oldest one I have to get (and store) all the transactions. Think what might happen if my wallet wasn't stored locally... it would mean getting MBs (potentially over slow connections) every single time!
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Even with thousands of transactions, that is not many bytes, certainly not "MBs."