Yeah, this is really a side effect of having a larger page size for traditional paging – only the JS-off view of the site uses traditional pages. So when you end up on “page 20” you have to scan through all (n) posts on that page to figure out where what you wanted is. Probably not too difficult when the page size is at the default of 20, but when the page size is set to 50, that’s 2.5× as much stuff to look through.
Pagination sure is awkward for us poor users, isn’t it? 
On the other hand, this isn’t materially different from ending up on a giant 5,000 word single page review for, say, the Samsung Note 4 and having to figure out where the specific text you were searching for is in the article.
Try searching in Google for this:
samsung note “incredibly finicky”
Now find that section of the review and read it. See what I mean?
Since we’re talking about traditional pagination here, as seen on the JS-off view of the site, is there any other traditional paginated forum that does what you’re proposing here @boomzilla? I suspect the answer is no, because it’d heavily pollute search results to have one “page” for every post in a topic, even if that post is only a sentence.