Ok. Here is a counterproposal.
If your primary interest is speed - it makes sense to keep max records small and stay within the current pagination structures.
But if you have a secondary interest in mass editability for data clean up - you are going to have to give up on spead of load time. These two use cases might not make sense combined on one page. Cloning a page is so trivial that it would see easy to set up a second page where the visible rows was set to 100 or show all. This page could be linked from the first page.
An aside Glenn; There is a problem with your proposal: The max records property controls what gets loaded from the database, while the tabel property merely arranges the pagination of all that data. So if you have 10,000 records and set it up as you describe, the page will load all 10,000 before displaying. (If it displays at all…)
But having said all that, it would be elegant if there was a way of overriding both the max rows property and the visible rows picklist on the table so the user could ask to see everything… We could call it the “table explosion button”
