With Research Age we now have

• 6 months lookback period instead of 14 days
• a maximum magnitude cap of 20000 (now its ~850 to get the maximum payment)
• Maximum research subsidy in one block will be 13500 instead of 75 right now

That means we can now support/pay 180000 researchers in theory because one staked block in 6 months will be enough to be paid out completely. And as we have 1000 blocks a day over 180 days we can support 180000 researchers/miners which means "unlimited" scalability. The past system could support ~800 or less. Again, everyone is researching on his own, there are no pools necessary to get fully paid!

If we ever reach 100k researchers I believe we will find a solution. The easiest one would be pools, but that means centralization so we would like to avoid that.