Dennis, Gary & co. have gone on record saying there was no gradual "matching" of similarly-ranked items going on. Item pairs were selected with no bias except to cover as many different item pairs as possible. (I also recall that about a week before the voting ended, somebody official said that 86% of all item pairs have been voted on - though that must factor out the cull.) So your estimate might be better than you think :)
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aka Steven T. Helt
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I don't know how it worked, but it became very clear to me that somehow similarly-themed items, similarly slotted items, and similarly-ranked items got paired up a lot as the voting went on. Maybe it was just the magic of certain item types being moreprevalent or certain slot having affinity for certain themes, but there were definitely enough pairings of themed items, same-slot items, and items in the same class of mechanical or formatting errors, to make it feel intentional.