What decisions do you regret?
I agree the basic networking has a lot of limitations. Compared with added more layers with networking, I'd rather have a simpler setup with fewer nodes, even if they are larger.
I don't know if AWS has the disclaimer up anymore, but the default limit is 50 with limit increases available to 100 with "no guarantee that performance will remain unaffected"... or something like that.
What network type are you using, out of curiosity?