Database size Best Practices

We are running Exchange 2003 Standard.  I arrived here about three months ago to find that the company had never bothered to write any policies relative to email retention; consequently, the size of the Database is enormous (50GB).  The limit was set in the registry to 52GB.  I have since altered the registry to reflect 75GB; however, I have spoken with a couple of Exchange administrators who have told me that it is risky to house the information store in a single DB file of this size.  The recommendation has been made to upgrade to Enterprise Edition and migrate the information store to the new environment and split the DB files into multiple Mailbox Stores (Standard Edition does not support multiple stores).  I am experiencing some resistance from the decision makers (who frankly have not made the best decisions in the past) about doing an upgrade.  They would prefer that we stay in the Standard edition environment and encourage users to delete and archive.  This may very well help in the short term but, we have a terrible storage environment and I don't feel that we can support a decent archiving policy until we get our hands around the storage issue.  I am concerned that we are running a risk with keeping such a large DB (even with archiving ...Exchange still just creates "White Space" and does not actually decrease the physical size of the DB files.) I have been told running such large files can lead to corruption.

Does anyone have any advice about an appropriate tact to take.

Upgrade?  Stay put? No brainer?

Thank you
Paul

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