I do accept that it is possible to do a cagillion mics with no feedback.

from my own experience i have ran 22 mics to a drum set plus an addition 12 mics for various items. All perfectly.

I brain farted when I wrote the post and missed a few points. My key point to say that sometimes in many different types of shows, mostly broadway and choral in origin, have to use sweetened tracks to avoid using all the mics. The mics in question are the body mics that use a omnidirection pickup pattern, allowing for creative placement of microphones to allow for costuming to conceal it. These mics can have the sensitivity turned down to a certain extent to avoid the problem, but depending on the acoustics and the relevence of blocking with the stage size, you can end up in pure sound engineering hell, or in heaven, it all depends on what you have to work with.

My only point was to point out the sometimes necessity of sweet tracks in the case of hellish acoustics.