I never said it was accurate. I said it was the closest thing we have to a pattern from which to
speculate about player population distribution. Since we'll never see FD's true statistics the only thing these public statistics are actually useful for is to provide the proverbial bannana skin for the self-righteous loud mouths to trip over
It is possible to measure the amount more accurately without further assistance from FD - it's just a lot of work and no-one on any side of the debate can be bothered to do so because whether the proportion of players in Open was 90% or 0.9% it wouldn't change their arguments one bit anyway...
1) Go to a relatively high traffic system, but not so high traffic it regularly has multiple supercruise instances. Something in the 250-1000 range would probably work well.
2) In Open, hang around in supercruise and count entries to the system for 24 [1] continuous hours. (Will probably need multiple counters)
3) At the end of those 24 hours, check the traffic report at any station. Compare the number who arrived to the number you saw arrive to get the % in Open on that platform.
4) Do the same for multiple systems to get a decent average for the platform.
5) Do the same on all three platforms to get the total proportion.
Not technically difficult, but certainly a lot of work.
[1] You could do it for less and then use various methods to model what proportion of the 24 hour traffic was in the hours you did measure, at some cost of accuracy.
