For the record, I hate the new 'feature' as well. I
sigs. I like seeing them, I like reading them, and I've never had a problem with them before. In fact, most of my favorite sigs were longer ones.
The first thing I look at when looking at people is the sig. Not the avatar, the sig. In fact, when the post is shorter than one screenwidth, the first thing I read isn't the post, but the sig. They're that important to me, and this abomination called a 'feature' is down-right obnoxious to what I would normally do.
More than that, when (and I say when, since really, it SHOULD be done) a feature is made for this to be optional, I'd prefer the default to be off, since I do most of my browsing when I'm logged off, and only log in to post or do stuff which I can only do when logged in. And if the default were set to on, then I'd no longer be able to do that. (Well, I COULD, but I wouldn't WANT to, because it'd be dang-annoying to manually press "show" on every single sig over the limit.)
And as another dent in the feature, it's not well-done.
My sig is three lines long. It just has extra space between them. If I removed the extra blank space, it'd be under the limit. Yet by not doing so, it's over the limit. It's the exact same sig. Nothing's longer or shorter. The only difference is that the three independent and separate thoughts would be more squished and therefore less separate than they should be. Making the signature's effect LESS powerful rather than MORE.