In our case, the index names come from uploaded binaries which we use to process data. For simplicity, we name them a similar thing to the binaries' names -- we could in principle name them our internal tracking id's, they're shorter, but it would complicate troubleshooting and more.
Our internal id's are 16 characters in length, and for my example above I had 156 indexes totaling ~6.500 characters in lenght (average: 41 characters), so using that we could go up to ~240 indexes before we hit the limit again.
I'm not sure aliases would help us (users may select any combination of indices.. We could create aliases on the fly -- but it's my impression that that would be even worse, it's a cluster-operation, right?).
Expansion might also not help. If we had two indices named AA and AB, and the user searches in "AA", we don't want to risk hitting AB by searching in "A*".
Mike.