Once in a while someone will reach out to us with this question - and it makes perfect sense. After all, if the average North American building uses studs that are 16" apart on-center, you would think something like 48" or 49" would make more sense for getting more two-studs shelves out of one 4-foot bracket.
While the math certainly looks a little better that way, there is a very simple reason we don't do this. Because of the dimensions of our product, exceeding 48" when shipping the package leads to an extremely large increase in the shipping costs to get the brackets in your hands. We've seen shipping increase as much as $40 when brackets are oversized. Since we do free shipping on orders of 2 or more brackets, we typically pay the shipping for our product. Increase that shipping cost by $40 per order, and suddenly we would need to charge you a lot more for the same product - that's a lose-lose for you AND us. After all, our goal is to get you all set up with the strongest floating shelves money can buy WITHOUT charging you an arm and a leg for them.
Likewise, with our 8-footer (actually 94"), once packaged, this is past 96 inches. Shipping instantly doubles in cost - instead of $40 or $50, suddenly you are looking at over $100 in shipping for a $158 product - not ideal. Beyond this, most shipping companies won't even accept a package longer than 8 feet.
So while you COULD theoretically get more bare-minimum-length shelves out of a longer bracket, you'd also be paying a lot more for the same product, something we'd rather avoid putting our valued customers through when we could put the Hovr into your hands at a lower cost. So there you have it - simpler than you thought and perfectly logical.