I agree with you completely, even with 5 characters (using MD5) there are over 1,000,000 available salt combinations to work through per row. Why waste precious bytes on superfluous characters. For 32 characters (a full MD5 string in hex.) there are over 3, 400, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 combinations. Overkill, sure! :)