The annoying part about "more" is being bombarded with "useless" messages. But the thing is, they aren't all that useless. For example, if I'm surrounded by summons, I don't want to have to press "more" just to see that they failed to hurt me 20 times a round. But I want to see if they punch through and damage my armour for example. My personal solution was to take advantage of the adom.msg and replace some messages with very shortened versions. So now I get something like "miss miss miss fth deflect block miss" ;). Also "You hear a distant wind." becomes "vortex" etc. etc. Perhaps something like this could be a toggleable option for experience players who saw these messages thousands of times. From experience, I'd say it reduces the need for "more" by 80-90%. And I only shortened the most common ones.
Following the previous one, shortening creature names could also help. Primary culprit is "writhing mass of primal chaos". Having it shortened to WMoPC would make D:50 so much more pleasant. Also, greater chaos servant -> GCS, etc.
Another idea would be prioritization and/or grouping. Grouping, so, instead of "<foo> misses you" 17 times, make something like "you've been missed 17 times" or "a monster misses you" (x17). Prioritization, so if player gets hit once, hit critically once, and missed 17 times, display both hits, and misses only if there's place left. And things like sounds of creatures ripping through webs would be lowest priority, so messages about them wouldn't be visible during combat, but visible when nothing else is happening.
A vertical scrolling message area would be fine too I guess, but still, scrolling through all the misses to check if something important happened would be annoying, and I'd guess most players wouldn't, therefore potentially losing out on some info. I'd say it could work, but coupled with some other option.