Yeah this is the right solution. Just add a link to the page numbers at the top of the thread. It's unintrusive, and still follows the minimalist design tenants of this website.
If the codebase is the problem then the obvious best solution is to write a bot that automatically posts dang's comment, with links to the various pages. :)
The pagination is only because of performance issues on the server to begin with. Rather than adding extra complexity at the top of the thread, the solution is to improve performance and render the whole page like we used to.