do you know what statistic I would most like to see instead of chapter depth?
Number of Contributors...
Think about it: what are the chances that a story with 27 contributors will not have SOMETHING worth reading?
Pretty low, I think.
While I agree with you on principle, there are a bunch of people who actively pursue people to add chapters to their stories. I personally have had 6 different people 'cold call' me asking me to write a few chapters for their stories. Me being a nice guy, I actually agreed a couple times. So it doesn’t mean that their stories inspired me, it means that I didn’t have the initiative to just tell them to take a hike, and it was just easier to knock off a string of chapters.