I think that the boat already sailed, there are many tools that assume that shortlogs are 72, and can be displayed on a single line, and format accordingly, including GitHub for instance. Besides, whether it's 72 or 100, it makes sense to force people to have a concise summary.
GitHub's approach is one reason I've started using BitBucket more. GitHub didn't always used to do this. I've assumed they started so they could have fixed height commit displays in their commit list. It seems weird to force this on people otherwise.
