As a career programmer, it never would have occurred to me to request a page, then another page, etc. in a loop. Jerry's right - that's a hack, and could easily be expected to result in IB's action, which affected other people too.
I ran into the limit on Tuesday, too, but by switching back and forth (manually) between the pending page and various stock pages with a bunch (hundreds) of orders pending. Every time you switch to a new page, it unsubscribes the quotes you were watching and subscribes those on the new page. If that's the pending page, and you have lots of orders open, you quickly hit the limit.
So, does anyone have a source of reliable inside-market ECN quotes via API? In particular, INCA has always been difficult/impossible to get elsewhere, and nobody except IB (lately) seems to be able to get ARCA quotes reliably. I need to watch a few hundred low-volume stocks.
If not, how much interest is there? I wouldn't mind putting together a ticker plant if there is enough interest.