I'm beginning to understand how this works.
It turns out that the more recent JDEs (the 4.0 for sure, haven't tried 3.7) allow you to bypass the limit in a sneaky way. The limit is still there; however, .cod files that exceed it still compile, but if you look at them with a debugger or dump utility like xxd (hint: install Cygwin) you can see that the magic number is no longer 0xc0de but 'PK'... in other words, it's a ZIP file masquerading as a .cod file. And if you unzip them you'll see that they are composed of a number of sub-cod's blather.cod, blather-1.cod, blather-2.cod, etc.
Now, the simulator seems to be able to handle these just fine, and so can a regular device (tested on 7290) under certain circumstances. For one thing, the large ones seem to need to have their own .jad or .alx; if a zipped .cod is in a list of multiple cods in a .jad or .alx, the device will choke on reaching it. And a 800k .cod wouldn't work no matter what, it just put the device in an endless reboot loop.
Regarding reaching your website: it turns out I can always reach it as
www.blackberrydevelopers.com, and for a while after that my bookmark as
www.blackberryforums.com will also work. But it I try to access it as
www.blackberryforums.com "cold", that is, after my DNS cache times out, it's no go.
