Oh, man, I didn't even think about this "gotcha" in the upgrade. The increase in default name length is great, but it does screw the upgrade path for existing sites.
No, it does not store the extra chars when it truncates. It is ... truncating ... at the max length just as it says it is. So those chars are gone forever.
Since it appears you've already done 85% or more of the work necessary to put together an upgrade script by brute force, would you have time to either tackle the full job or perhaps cooperate with someone else who is willing to work on it?
This really sucks.
