WCF: The maximum nametable character count quota (16384) has been exceeded

Today I came across and interesting WCF problem.  A dev in our team added a new method to a WCF service and tried to update the service reference from the client app but got this error:

The error message is very helpful because you can figure out from it that something is now larger then a default value, that something being the SOAP message sent by the metadata exchange binding.  Oh that’s easy to fix, just put bigger values in the config file right?  Wrong because the mexBinding doesn’t provide any properties to change these values.

A quick search lead me to this great post :
http://geekswithblogs.net/claraoscura/archive/2007/08/20/114806.aspx

Since you can’t change the default values, you need to use a different binding type and you also need to up these values in the Svcutil config file that Visual Studio uses to generate/update the service reference.

Why is the max value so low (16384)?  No idea.