My reasoning for requesting this is that on some of the pages listed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MostLinkedPages would require 9,000+ API requests to populate the list (also, because that special page has the counts readily available, I'm assuming it IS in the database someplace).

Its not in the database, those special pages are a real pain to update. I would tend to close this as {{WONTFIX}} due to the limited benefit, and need for high resources to create and maintain this feature. JobQueue and other components would make having this counter consistent unfeasible

(In reply to comment #2)

Its not in the database, those special pages are a real pain to update. I
would tend to close this as {{WONTFIX}} due to the limited benefit, and need for
high resources to create and maintain this feature. JobQueue and other
components would make having this counter consistent unfeasible

Yes, I realize that it those pages with multi-millions of links to are edge cases, but wouldn't having thousands of API requests be more resource intensive?

COUNT queries can be expensive, and there is no interesting use case.

The use case you proposed on en:WP:VPT, showing a count in the "what links here" link to determine if something is orphaned, would work equally well if you did just the one backlinks query and displayed ">500" or "501+" or the like if it would need continuation (and really, you could probably limit it to even less for that particular use case).