Well, searching in the amalgamation that error message only shows up in one place, in the selectExpander function. So my complete amateur guess is that it looks like while the definition of the view is fine, when you expand all the view definitions out, the "model" table gets referenced more than 65,535 times, which would probably overflow a specific counter somewhere. Since they're explicitly checking for it I'd consider it a "designed-in constraint", but again, this is just an amateur guess.
```
/*
** This routine is a Walker callback for "expanding" a SELECT statement.
** "Expanding" means to do the following:
**
** (1) Make sure VDBE cursor numbers have been assigned to every
** element of the FROM clause.
**
** (2) Fill in the pTabList->a[].pTab fields in the SrcList that
** defines FROM clause. When views appear in the FROM clause,
** fill pTabList->a[].pSelect with a copy of the SELECT statement
** that implements the view. A copy is made of the view's SELECT
** statement so that we can freely modify or delete that statement
** without worrying about messing up the persistent representation
** of the view.
**
** (3) Add terms to the WHERE clause to accommodate the NATURAL keyword
** on joins and the ON and USING clause of joins.
**
** (4) Scan the list of columns in the result set (pEList) looking
** for instances of the "*" operator or the TABLE.* operator.
** If found, expand each "*" to be every column in every table
** and TABLE.* to be every column in TABLE.
**
*/
static int selectExpander(Walker *pWalker, Select *p)
...
Table *pTab;
...
}else{
/* An ordinary table or view name in the FROM clause */
assert( pFrom->pTab==0 );
pFrom->pTab = pTab = sqlite3LocateTableItem(pParse, 0, pFrom);
if( pTab==0 ) return WRC_Abort;
if( pTab->nTabRef>=0xffff ){
sqlite3ErrorMsg(pParse, "too many references to \"%s\": max 65535",
pTab->zName);
pFrom->pTab = 0;
return WRC_Abort;
}
...
/*
** The schema for each SQL table and view is represented in memory
** by an instance of the following structure.
*/
struct Table {
...
u32 nTabRef; /* Number of pointers to this Table */
...
```