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As far as google crawling and de-indexing all of the pages with the noindex tag, is that a time consuming process before all of the pages are removed?

If you have a site with a few thousand high quality and authoritative pages, and tens of thousands with search results and tags pages with thin content, and noindex,follow the thin content pages all at once, will google see this is a good or bad thing?

I am only trying to do what Google guidelines suggest, but since I have so many pages index on my site, will throwing the noindex tag on ~80% of thin content pages negatively impact my site?

According to this article http://www.seroundtable.com/farmer-headers-13111.html

It sounds like I should be 404ing these pages since I never plan to re-writer them and I want them removed from my site and from the index.

According to this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-robotstxt-advice-12759.html

They believe you shouldn't use robots.txt..

Anyone know the best option in this situation? Should I just 404 a handful of the 40k pagination pages every week/month until they are all 404'd?

I have a website that has around 90k pages indexed, but after doing the math I realized that I only have around 20-30k pages that are actually high quality, the rest are paginated pages from search results within my website. Every time someone searches a term on my site, that term would get its own page, which would include all of the relevant posts that are associated with that search term/tag. My site had around 20k different search terms, all being indexed.  I have paused new search terms from being indexed, but what I want to know is if the best route would be to 404 all of the useless paginated pages from the search term pages. And if so, how many should I remove at one time? There must be 40-50k paginated pages and I am curious to know what would be the best bet from an SEO standpoint. All feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks.