This might be a quite silly question, but I can\'t figure anything out that might help me go further. I\'m looking to shorten the number of NUMBERS in my page navigation.
What you might want to do is use the "logarithmic" pagination technique described in my answer here:
How to do page navigation for many, many pages? Logarithmic page navigation
If you set LINKS_PER_STEP to a low value like 2 or 3, it'll produce very compact output.