Being an enthusiast of "long" event blurb descriptions, I tend to overstep the 1024-character limit rather quickly

Since most browsers have JavaScript enabled these days, a possible workaround is just to implement some of the ideas mentioned on this article: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/textarea.html. Naturally enough, you should keep the current code, for the ones using, say, text-only browsers to post events or having JavaScript disabled.
That "fix" should take your web designers just about 2 minutes of copying & pasting any one of those (tiny) scripts and placing them on the "edit event page" — and save us all a lot of time

Thanks in advance,
- Gwyn