So me and
@Oneiros43 were having a rather enlightening conversation in chat. Turns out we're responsible for the deaths of about ~50 nin when all is said and done. Something is flagging my "something weird is going on here" sensor, so here this post is.
We hear in the beginning of the quest that Mist estimates that Leaf has 1000-1500 ninja, best estimate about 1200-1300 ninja. If the two Mountain clans that fought us could oppose us and still have a viable face to show us later could spare 50 ninja between them, I estimate that those clans had maybe 150 ninja total, because about 1/3 is the maximum number of military forces I can imagine that they would be able to commit after calling up anyone they could spare and being able to still talk afterwards. Extrapolating outwards through the clans, the whole Mountain Village has maybe 700 ninja to the outside. This implies that a village hidden in the middle of bumfuck nowhere has about half the ninja that Leaf does. Something is very wrong here.
The distinct possibility is that those numbers were most of the two clan's numbers; I doubt it, especially since the two clans are still in a position to negotiate rather than being dismissed as "you're all civilians you what mate". In the aftermath, it also states that several dozen ninja were there watching over us, which is still nearly 10% of their entire force at the upper bound.
So! What could be going wrong? How does a village in bumfuck nowhere having no contact with the outside world have half the amount of ninja that Leaf does? I think it's because of insanely high casualty rates. I also think that a large portion of the lower ranked troops in ninja warfare are from allied clans rather than the actual villages themselves. This means that all the ninja villages are constantly in a state of trying to woo over the neighboring clans to beat up the other guy, 'cept Grass and Waterfall said "fuck no" and are essentially the sixth Great Hidden Village, taken together with the alliance of minor villages Grass put together.
This raises the real possibility that
the Warring States Period may not be over yet. If that's the case, and none of the national boundaries are well defined, then I expect to see everyone be killing each other at every opportunity, skyrocketing mission fatalities (assume that any ninja encountering foreign nin have a 50% survival rate or worse), and a set of loosely defined alliances and an even harsher sense of tribalism. The only difference is that rather than be thousands of different clans, we're now dealing with hundreds who are still busy fighting over every scrap of land. The power centers wouldn't be all that different either; it'd simply revolve around five more well defined power centers rather than the nebulous web of power nodes that are constantly shifting.
In other words; There is no Fourth Great War because the First never ended and never really started; It's all just an extension of the Warring States Period. We don't have nationstates here; we have feudalism fueled by fucktons of magic, and the two solutions are an alliance to end all alliances or one nation above all.