I was just bitten by this limitation as well.
(Even the User Guide says it should be 5000 characters:
Fibery)
I hit this limitation in Formula field where it’s output is a text field. Specifically a formula that joins all related entity’s public ids in order to check for “contains”. Using this trick: "Contains" formula function - #3 by RonMakesSystems
After there were 300 related entities, this business critical functionality is now broken…
I think i will edit it to use | instead of {} to reduce character count for the time being, but it’s just a problem waiting to show up again…
1000 characters is really quite small when it comes to data amount… it’s like 1kb… Is there any chance to bump this value up to like 10,000 characters? 10kb? I know everything needs some kind of upper limit, heck even rich text fields have an upper limit (2.7mb), but if we could bump this up, at least until there’s a proper “contains” function in formulas, that would be very appreciated!!