I have been inactive a while. Can someone tell me whether the user contribution page is going to return to listing contributions or is it going to stick with the recent changes format of within last 30 days?

The limits are important, because otherwise some of the lists would be thousands of entries and bog down the server. But the count limit and the time limit are both completely selectable in the URL. I don't want to have links on the page for anything more than 30 days or 500 results, because then they might get spidered. But if you want to see you contributions, just make yourself a link on your own page with a URL that has a large day count, like this:

http://www.wikipedia.com/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target...

It will be slow, but it will give you the info.