MySQL lifts restriction on VARCHAR'length from 255 to 64K. So you can change TEXT columns to VARCHAR(30000). It might not be a good idea to do it though as when MySQL sorts things it uses a temp table with no variable length columns allowed - so these VARCHARs turn to CHARs which can explode the row size and thus the size of the whole temporary table above the maximum size of an in-memory temporary table. This commits it to disk and as it is huge it takes a long time.

Conclusion: long varchars are there but they suck. Limit their length and test test test before deploying changes to the live.