This is ... legitimately insane. Why on earth do you need more than 50 for a 2d portrait?
Modern 3d, cinematic quality, real-time characters barely go over 800 bones. There is no reason you need to for portraits.
Have you tried finessing the skinning of your mesh to the skeleton rather than adding more bones?
First of all 100 and 800 are two radically different numbers, just as much "100 or 1000" are also two radically different numbers. 250 to 500 would be a fine compromise just so that I am never in a position where I have like 80 bones and can't use my hard work.
Also:
1. I believe I have already explained in the other thread that I was in the process of finding bones to delete, and since making that post managed to *this time* trim it down to a mere 50 bones.
2. Your claim that I have no need for so many bones is really erroneous. More bones means more control, and better quality animations. Lets count this out, for a *simple* rig and a simple humanoid mesh, which weirdly enough, being 2D has zero bearing on the number of bones!:
Root->Hips->Navel->Torso->Neck-Head->Hair_Root (7)
Torso->Shoulder.L->Upper_Arm.L->Lower_Arm.L->Hand.L (4)
Torso->Shoulder.R->Upper_Arm.R->Lower_Arm.R->Hand.R (4)
Torso->Chest.L / Torso->Chest.R (2)
So I am at 17 just for the base body. If I had Thumb+Fingers that would be another +4 for Left and right Sides. But I already didn't have these.
So here comes the majority of my bone usage: Hair.
For long hair with long bangs:
Hair_Root->Hair0.L->Hair1.L->Hair2.L->Hair3.L
Hair_Root->Hair0.R->Hair1.R->Hair2.R->Hair3.R
Hair_Root->HairBack0->HairBack1->HairBack2->HairBack3
This is +16 Bones for *just* one hair style. I have four. This hairstyle uses the most, other styles use less.
This doesn't count having bones to control say, the brow (hair along the middle of your hairline).
I *originally* used just one set of bones for different hairsetyles using a single front and back mesh but it didn't look right trying to cludge a single set of bones for four very distinctly different hairstyles and I ended up with a weird flickering issue which so far has only been solved the current method.
Definitely there isn't a way to simplify the hair style rigs beyond "Maybe I can go from 4 bones to 3 for slightly less detail?". If I have something like twintails vs something like a long wide ponytail vs long full hair; these all need their own rigs. I think I had mentioned in the other thread for hair I use two meshes. A front mesh and a back mesh (one to go in front of the face/body mesh, one behind); trying to overlay the mesh textures such that UV unwrapping them to appear in line with the body mesh *and* having a single rig to rig my animations to work with any hair style was in the end impractical.
Instead I use 8 meshes, four front meshes, four back meshes; UV unwrapped so each mesh corresponds to a different quadrant of the texture file and instead of having all of my dds textures for hairs being roughly the same coordinates, they've been reexported so a style corresponds to a quadrant; and then I skin each mesh front-back pair to their own sub-armature so now I am more free to make custom animations regardless of hairstyle. The currently unused hair meshes show up as invisible because the part of the texture file is empty with only alpha channel.
I was 57/50 bones for four hairstyles; I was able to find 7 bones to delete; but it is really annoying to have this kind of limit at all when it is almost 99% certainty just an arbitrary macro definition like, #define MAX_HAIR 50 in one of the stellaris source code files. It could be easily 100, or 200, or 1,000 with no performance hit until someone actually uploads a custom animated portrait with 1,000 bones.
I don't know why you made the claim that a 2D animation inherently uses less bones as it is quite false, 2D animations using Spline, Live2D, etc like the Launcher animations in the League of Legends client easily use 200 bones for high quality animations; there are games like Shadowverse that are also bone intensive and that is the level of quality I am aiming for.
Fortunately *this* time I was able to reduce my number of bones, but this is a limitation and presumably without a need for it to be so small; if I wanted complicated hairstyles *and* like an alien creature with animated tentacle appendages this would be extremely difficult to make it work.
I think minimum the number of joints allowed should be 100, but 250 would be much better. Allowing me to have different hairstyles and non-humanoid body types like tentacle monsters, lamias/nagas, other kinds of insectoids and so on. Or wings! I have to choose between wings or hair basically, and I can't have animated fingers or thumbs.
Trust me, I know what I'm doing when it comes to rigging I've been doing it for five years. Asking for a higher bone limit isn't insane when the limit is just so low and arbitrary. Maybe 1,000 is too much, but 100-250 is reasonable.