I just expect plenty of mods to remove the new broken content, so as to free up those nice sprite IDs, and replace it with Useful content. Heck, I think last time I installed my huge set of mods I play with, I hit 8 IDs. I imagine notch used at least 8 more ids, so I suppose I will have to drop one next time, unless someone comes out with an anti-notch fix.
Been my biggest fear since modding day 1 with me... I'm still hopeful for a Forge fix where we can condense Notch's 'block footprint' to something much more managable... however, idk how to go about this without altering the architecture of Minecraft base entirely... Which, ironically, translates into a completely different game altogether... :-/
Still, I hope it can be done... otherwise a force-extend on our current slots limits may be the only other option that we have...