Greg! Thanks for looking into this.

Ok, so I knew about the getCount() vs getTotalCount().

But that does not solve my issue.

I chose getCount(), because it show the length of the available/returned data and it's the data I'm after:

getCount
function (){
        return this.data.length || 0;
    }

In my example above change

the first console output to: s.data

and

the second console output to: d.rows


Now, how can I force for the entire data set to load, not just 'a page made up of one element'?!

Switching to from Ext3 to Ext4 might not be an option at this time either...

I don't understand what the exact underlying issue is, since other usage cases work fine for me.