We have a scenario where when we activate a channel that has 86 tables, we'll get failures and aren't able to complete the activation.   The workaround was to activate sets of tables in multiple passes until all 86 were active.    see support ticket 220892

I can see two different options to handle this process differently: (although there could be others)

1. check the replica identity setting on the table before trying to set it.  This would allow multiple full activations to be run until all tables have the values set, or allow a manual update of the setting before the HVR activation run
2. Find the reason that activation doesn't scale well for higher table counts and fix that.