Tree based textboard

What does /prog/ think about boards like treeboard[1] and ayashii world[2]?

[1] http://tree-board.net/
[2] https://sonzaishinaiworld.heliohost.org/bbs/bbs.php?m=tree

Tree are also too complex to store due
being multidimensional structures.
Reddit servers cap number of simultaneously displayed posts
at 500 and force clicking "more replies":
With a flat thread paging, they could load 10k posts/page
effortlessly , tree structured posts require constructing
a database query to load them.
If reddit can't handle big threads on the server farm they
own, how can a hobby textboard scale?