James, thanks for that update. I've filed a new ticket for this issue, #1096 (http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/tktview?tn=1096). I hope you don't mind that I quoted your response and implementation suggestion in the body of that ticket.
There you express some concerns about performance. However, it seems to me that the chief use case for LIMIT ... OFFSET is paging results for interactive display, in which case the repeated queries are going to occur at human-speed intervals, no more than once every few seconds. It's not as if the query is going to be recompiled inside a tight loop, so I think any speed gain would be meaningless.
That said, allowing placeholders there would make for slightly easier coding. I'm not sure, though, that that's a big enough concern to warrant complicating SQLite's own code.
