It's important to learn conscision of arguments, even if you eventually end up finding that you much prefer arguing without such concerns. And for the sake of professors, I support a [i]page limit[/i] of sorts, but a, say, 2500-3000 word limit has always struck me as arbitrary. Why not just say 7-10 pages and have something of a floating maximum so that you'll accept about 11?

Word limits do definitely hinder those of us who want to write an honors thesis or eventual dissertation... those things are long and wordy as fuck, basically everything we were ever taught to avoid.