You're right.

I found the original email equally disappointing, though. It boils down to "We pushed the envelope on size, it's too slow, we'd like to speed it up." Well, duh.

He uses the word 'scalability' early in the email, but shows no indication that he knows what it means. I'd love to hear if different operations slow down at different rates as the repo accumulates commits. Do they scale linearly, sublinearly, or superlinearly as the repo grows? Are there step functions at which there's a sudden dramatic slowdown (ran out of RAM, etc.)?