When did you ever see Apostates etc walking around with <500 troops? They have always had >1000 troops on each merc... So the fact that greys have >1000 troops on each player also just keeps the ratio the same..
Why on earth would you keep troops on every player? Its a waste of money and if the player is slightly inactive it is troops that are tied up and unavailable for use. However I agree that the average merc (or Anti-UIF) player probably has the same number of troops as the average UIF player. My assumption comes from the fact that Greys had 40k troops in Suno fairly recently but currently that is only at 20k and their other garrisons have not gone up by that amount in the mean time.
As far as gold tied up in equipment... Both sides are using plate so once again this keeps the ratio correct..
I think I know what equipment we are using and we have still been using Black Coat of Plates with Gauntlets whilst the UIF armies attacking Hawaha and Jamiche started to use Gothic Plate and Plate Mittens. They didn't use it exclusively but we didn't use it at all and since The Coalition represents a lot of the anti-UIFs gold I can tell you that there would definitely be a lot less of it in our fiefs if we had been buying Gothic Plate.
And finally your market point just confirms that the ratio is correct
Druzhina fiefs currently owned by the Anti-UIF were only recently taken over meaning their market share is allocated to the Anti-UIF. Does this suddenly mean that all trading done in the past from these fiefs by the UIF never happened? Market share is only an indication of what is happening now and on its own tells you absolutely nothing about what might have happened in the past.
Basically i'm saying that it is impossible to determine an accurate ratio of power from the data available on its own. I can however surmise that the ratio on show is weighted in favour of the Anti-UIF at this time, due to the 3 things I have mentioned. To say how much it is in our favour would be pure guess work.