ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers - why so few?

Unless someone here happens to work on the Windows Shell team, I doubt that you're going to get an answer that really addresses the technical limitations and how they affect the design choice. But I'll try...

My guess is that there isn't any technical limitation, or at least there isn't one now. The real reason is presumably that no one has ever taken the time to sit down and update the code, the design, and the spec to lift this limitation. Features aren't implemented by default, and just because the computing environment has changed in the last few years doesn't mean that someone sat down and rewrote Windows to take full advantage of all those changes.

You should also consider that is more than likely a conscious design choice, rather than an imposed limitation. Raymond Chen (who actually does work on the shell team) published a blog entry responding to the uproar about Windows 7 removing the "sharing hand" overlay. He makes a compelling argument that the icon overlay is really not a desirable way of showing information (above and beyond the fact that the system is limited to 15) [emphasis added]:

Generally speaking, overlays are not a good way of presenting information because there can be only one overlay per icon, and there is a limit of 15 overlays per ImageList. If there are two or more overlays which apply to an item, then one will win and the others will lose, at which point the value of the overlay as a way of determining what properties apply to an item diminishes since the only way to be sure that a property is missing is when you see no overlay at all. (If you see some other overlay, you can't tell whether it's because your property is missing or because that other overlay is showing instead of yours.)