It's been my assumption that with a little bit of scripting, EasyList could be pruned to land within the 30K without too much trouble. As you have more experience in this fields though, do you have any thoughts on how viable this approach would be, and if the 30K limit will be a problem in the end?

Doesn't any finite length list that is only able to be updated when the addon is updated mean ad networks can use a random string with more combinations than the size of list to defeat all ad blocking?

Yes, that seems plausible.

Wow, ok that means 30,000 definitely won't be an existential threat for them.