I think you'd find that the header/footer data would be trivial with modern compression and caching in browsers. Additionally, longer pages requires more memory to render, so older mobile devices may become sluggish.
And whilst everyone can set up their own page length, that doesn't actually prevent the system from being designed to provide a page link. The website database stores your preferences and would know when person X runs a search. It should not be hard to write it to check the user's preferences for the number of posts per page, then calculate the page number.
