I believe that we need a max outgoing connection count of 25 to allow better peering globally. To my knowledge, this connection increase should not give rise to much of a difference in resources used. It should speed up peering over all. Recently there has been some delay in acknowledgement of transactions before a block has been mined, and in one case it took 2 extra blocks for a transaction to relay to a block. This transaction did have an attached fee as well. 
As discussed, this may have been planned already, however an oversight may have caused connection counts not to be changed.