You guys need to realize Badspot knows what he's doing, he wouldn't have used GLSL if he knew another method would perform in a better way. Switching our lighting would literally just be going back and redoing something that was done right the first time, not being able to render more than 8 lights at a time isn't a huge deal unless you're playing a large city map or something.
My only question is, if the sun flare doesn't count as a light then why can't we create the same light on bricks, therefore avoiding the limit?