Rankings (or rating yourself) --RANT--

I know that I have seen others talk about "how good am I if I swim the 200 in this time", or "if my mile is 17min". and then the responses are typically, look at results from previous meets, or last years top 10 time. But does anyone try to take into account how many actually swim that event/distance? Is one a good swimmer merely because only 12 people swim the 400 IM. I looked at the 2007 top 10 SCM for Men 30-34. for *** and IM I would have been top 10 in 3 of 6 events/distances. 50 br 33.37 outside of top 10 100br 1:14.08 (10) 200br 2:42.20 (7) 400 IM 5:19.71 (7) but how many 30-34 competed in those events in 2007? I would guess that more people competed in 2006 at the World Championships in Cali. In Sweden I have top 10 times in nearly everything but 50-100 free, but that is only because it's not too often that there are more than 10-12 swimmers in my age grupp. I know of 4-6 swimmers that will be 35-39 in 2010 and all of them are significanly faster than me, just not sure swimming at the Worlds is something they plan on doing. I recently looked at a German time standard, since they had one for every year 11-18 and then an open I used the open table. The table was scaled to 1-20. 20 being the fastest. something simliar to the US AAAA standards but with more divisions. I was at best 6 of a possible 20 in Breaststroke. and not even 1 in Back and Fly. and between 1-2 for Free and IM. to me that seems more like a realistic measurement of my ability.