Permalinks Updates

I have been reading articles about the issue related to the common /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/ permalinks. After many hours, I can say that if your blog may eventually have many posts and readers, /%post_id%/%postname%/ would be the best option.

What I am wondering is if this issue (which is probably causing many problems and overloading Web hosts with unnecessary data) has been fixed with the new 3.0 updates and above.

If you look at this article, which created quite some controversy and even caught the attention of Matt Cutts, you can read the update at the top which says:

Update 1/4/2011: The problems described in this article regarding WordPress functionality breaking due to permalink structures have been fixed in version 3.0 and higher. Now the permalink structure suggested by the people mentioned in this article is the best solution for SEO optimized URL’s. ? However the WordPress Codex, the official WordPress documentation, still suggests that you should start your permalink structure with a number for performance reasons. In most WordPress sites, the performance hit caused using the permalink structure suggested by the SEO experts below would not be large enough to out-weigh the SEO benefits.

Is this true?

Also, would using /%postname%.html completely solve this permalink problem?

Thanks for the input.