I thought of that, but there are occasions where having longer and more descriptive titles can be useful. So it’s a shame that it impacts other parts of the site negatively.
Having said that, “longer” is all relative. I just did a quick scan through of the forums I use to find longer, but still usefully named, topics. All but one were still well under 100 characters, and the longest one was 107. (The one that caused me trouble was 197 characters, but the topic title was not at all useful.) But having said that, the lines start to wrap after anywhere from 25 to 35 characters depending on their width, so you’d have to make the max title length pretty low to avoid this situation entirely.
It also happens that those usefully named topics titles around 60-80 characters were largely in Japanese, where the characters are uniform length (and wider than English characters). So it would take fewer characters to get into this situation.