I thought windows allowed this already with some sort of weird UNC path spec. Instead of "c:/program files/whatever", you'd do "//?/c/program files/whatever", and then it lets you use really long paths. Or is that not right? I'm just going off vague memories and [0]; I'm really not a windows guy.
[0]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...