Ratte said:
@savageorange: Probably so people can't break display by having an absurdly tall or long image. A lot of things allow limitations based on dimensions (such as DA) but not area.

Logical, but seems too simplistic a solution to me. Easy for uploaders to understand but penalizes making comics (for example).
A straight up 'you cannot upload images with an aspect ratio greater than 1:X / X:1' limit would be more to the point IMO.