I'm pretty sure the 10-year upgrade is already in place for December. I think Rat put it in a long time ago. It's not a limitation of vBulletin, just an annoyance. Rayn said one of the biggest mistakes he made when he started the site was the title system. It divided people based on nothing more than sign-up date which is dumb.
It is also a pain keeping up with custom titles. You'd hope that people with custom titles would be satisfied with having a custom title, but unfortunately most get pretty pissy when they don't have that little number updated in sync with their registration date. All around it's pretty dumb.