There's ways to shrink the bit cost down, for sure. The commas in my example are particularly expensive, for instance, since commas aren't part of QR's alphanumeric set.

It was just a quick expression of an idea, presented in the form of a gripe; it's not a formal specification.

As to consumers, and their hardware: People still get new phones and features can be (and sometimes actually are) added to existing phones. I'm not too worried about it as a constraint; things would catch up soon enough.