I think part of making this number more accurate is reasoning out how many people are even active on the sub. Subscribed users could be people who make an alt: do they count as one or two or even more? Subscribed users could be dormant accounts, etc etc. I think you see my point. There are currently 0.05% of the subscribers online: so 1 in 5 are applying? That seems like a lot considering this post has 70 upvotes :P

So, maybe let's say that 1/3 of subscribers are alts; now we have ~1,500 applicants. A handful are trolls, 1 in every 10 applicants - maybe 150? probably more :P Not to mention the number of just straight up, easily rejected applicants (people who don't even understand the rules, don't meet some minimum reqs for the time on reddit/reasons for applying/etc) which maybe take up a few minutes (probably at least 50%), so 675 now which are worth actually looking at. There are 10 moderators, so they have to look at maybe like 70 each - still it does have about 100 comments. All of this after nearly 3 weeks open.

Those 675 applicants maybe don't come in all at once, over several weeks they trickle in (since the application is open that long), so that's maybe 1 a day for 10 weeks for each moderator. That seems reasonable, I think.