State/Province not synced with country

AFAIK the drop-down list for States/Provinces in a profile includes all provinces listed in the civicrm.settings.php under
define ('CIVICRM_PROVINCE_LIMIT', 'US,CA')

This works fine if your site is limited to one country and associated states. But if one wishes to service ALL countries in the world, the dropdown list would run in the thousands and be entirely unusable

At the very least, the state/province list should revert to a textfield for countries not listed in CIVICRM_PRIVINCE_LIMIT

My own site has users from about 90 countries. If I can't find a work around I can't use CIVICRM at all!

Any fix for this problem?