... Your problem could be solved in many ways: using a band-aid, or designing your client to get rid of self-imposed constraints. ...
There is a real use case for paged results (at least I had a similar problem, too): As we had to write a piece of software for a BIG company with thousands of accounts stored in an Active Directory server, we had to fetch all accounts from the AD server. Starting using asynchronous calls, all went fine, until we noticed, that the SERVER side had a restriction to not give out more than 1000 results per single query.
We could not find a "nice" workaround for this restriction (I dont know if the AD server CAN not give out more than X results per query, or whether the admins did not WANT to remove this limit).
We solved this by splitting the "big" query in 26 single queries (all accounts starting with "A", all accounts starting with "B" and so on) - but this solution is ugly and does not scale very well.
So a "real" solution for paged results would have been nice (until now I did not know RFC 2696).
regards -stefan-