Number of Terms Returned Excessive

I apologize - this was a "stupid user error" (c'est moi). I hadn't realized that each content type has it's own setting for the number of terms retrieved, and some of these were set to "-1", namely "no limit".

It does seem odd that there's a global setting when the local settings for each content type override it: is there a circumstance in which the global setting applies? Perhaps it becomes the default when creating new content types?