"Infinite scroll will never be a good idea."

I very much disagree. It's an awesome way to capture the reader. I love it myself, not needed reloads, hunting for 'next' buttons, ... Yes you lose the relative position on the page indicator from the scroll bar, but it's irrelevant by the time you get to the bottom of the page anyway.

You also lose all indication of the total content length, which is IMHO a bad thing in many contexts.

If the content is not truly infinite (#comments known?), just very large, you could solve the scrollbar issue by giving the page the right vertical size (or an estimation), but only populating the HTML if the user scrolls somewhere.

so the page looks broken or like its still loading? Yah great usability

You'd use AJAX to load the elements, so it doesn't show as loading. And you make sure the user never sees the empty space, given normal scrolling speed, by loading the area around the visible screen. Certainly not worse than extending the page when the user reaches the bottom, as some sites do.