Yes, the 16K and 32K limits have been around for too long. Doing all fields with RichText is too cumbersome. Make the text fields 4GB of size, as Strings in LS are too.
I've had to do a lot of goofy things to groups to work around the 32k limit. And don't get me started on that "extended" configuration in Quickplace. I couldn't imagine what really large orgs have to do it.
This is one of the things that makes an easy argument against Notes as an application platform and I have personnally seen it used to help justify a move to .NET. Getting this limit up to something that makes sense in 2007 would at least take away that argument. I also have to think that by now whatever technical limitation existed 10 years ago is less relevant.
Admittedly, there could be problems with backward compatibity in a mixed/legacy environment, so this would have to be done carefully.
I'd really like to have it expanded to the 1 MB range, but there are always limits.
I've never seen a displacement of Oracle that attacks the 4k limit on text fields. Nor anyone who excluded Word for Windows based on their appallingly-low limit on document text (which I've hit more than once).