I am not sure what you mean by "the maxium numer is whatever the course default is when it was created" You can for sure increase the number of sections manually in a course - I was assuming David wanted to increase the number visible in existing courses in one go, rather than manually going in and adding new topic sections as Rick says.
Mary Cooch (personal account)
Publicaciones hechas por por Mary Cooch (personal account)
I don't think you can change it for existing courses from within the interface - and sorry I don't know about changes in the database. Maybe someone else does.
Site administration > Courses > Course default settings > Number of sections - change the default.
Rick's suggestion reminds me a bit of this (Q and A forum) related tracker issue MDL-37712
понятно - это наверное из-за новой навигации в Moodle 4.0 - Это действительно важно для вас?