Your assumption isn't accurate, because it completely discounts the possibility of lesser Sects, which are almost always a thing--as well as stuff like the previously mentioned "Let's just throw a bunch of people into training camps and rapidly push them up to early red/gold and then use them as our foot soldiers". The amount of people who actually get considered as members in a Great Sect are the ones who are at least at the 'Average' level. Note how "Average" talent however was considered a malus of the High Noble background. Which is to say, that even then, someone who's merely 'Average' isn't going to get very far.
So let's take Han Jian--I don't seriously believe he has major aspirations towards getting to the Inner Sect, simply because it's too unreasonable for someone of simply average talent. If this was a more normal year, where three absolute fucking monsters weren't at the top, and several other potentially scary other competitors waiting in the wings, he might be an okay shot--but it's far more likely that the overall goal of his family was for him to get some real world seasoning and contacts so that when he returns home, he can be useful to his family--which is rich enough that they can basically carry him up to Green/Bronze, where he'll likely serve as a decent captain or city governor somewhere. Barring a the acquisition of some kind of Talent Cheat, he's just not destined to go that far--even absolutely superlative effort would likely only push him up to Cyan/Iron before his 'Average' Talent makes breakthrough rolls just too difficult.
Meanwhile, you've got Bai Meizhen, Sun Liling, and Cai Renxiang, who are all Late Yellow/Silver bordering on Green/Iron themselves. I wouldn't put them as lower than Talent 6--and it means that what amounts to being the same amount of resources poured into their early Cultivation compared to the other noble students (Again, the bottleneck is what you can actually absorb, and the weekly maximum of a Red/Gold doesn't even qualify as a rounding error to even a mid ranking noble house, and Yellow/Silver isn't much more. Hence, I suspect the difference in resources isn't very great between them). Huang Da--I suspect--is in the same boat as Han Jian in the sense that his Talent is 'Merely' Average. In the space of about two months or so, we went from nothing to being capable of fighting him as a peer--if not beating him solo, and he completed his breakthrough at around the same time.
The next level up is what I suspect the likes of Kang Zihao and Li Suyin are at--Talent 5 or so. And in this case, we see the difference between a high noble, and the middle class--which is to say, the former is roughly in the middle of Yellow or so (Strong enough to be a workout, but the real monsters still have a cultivation edge--if Zihao actually felt he was Meizhen's equal, he wouldn't have risked the embarrassment of trying to attack while she was weakened.) Li Suyin meanwhile has been pretty consistently doing well whenever she has the motivation to do so--her biggest problem was her lack of motivation, combined with the fact that her inheritance is apparently stupidly complicated and requires a lot of groundwork to start learning. But as we've seen, whenever she sets her mind to it, she tends to make progress quite quickly. Hence how she went from nothing to Early Gold with about a week of training (Even if Early Gold is pretty easy).
Finally, there's where we sit--and likely the other Real Fucking Monsters--at Talent Six. And at this point, the difference between "Has resources and a slight head start" stops being a rounding error and becomes the difference between "One starts as a mere mortal, the other is in the middle of Yellow" When your Talent is good, it means every scrap of investment poured into you counts for that much more. I suspect that the other real fucking monsters have only been training for a few months themselves, if only because it's probably a bad idea to start Cultivating before puberty starts. The problem is that they had extensive resources and training to begin with, and excellent Arts to build their foundation with.
Then you've got Ji Rong at Talent 7. Who is absolutely fucking destroying everybody to the point that even though he's losing a month of training, he's still a favorite to win the tournament of entry. Like, keep in mind, we had one Art mastered at the end there, he had three. Admittedly, I think the definition of "Mastered" means that it's an Art that you've trained to the limit of what your Cultivation allows before a breakthrough, but it does mean that now that resources are more equalized, that every point he gets is just worth that much more compared to even the other monsters--and your starting advantages become less and less decisive as the ranks rise up. After all, even if you get more successes, your dice pools are still limited, and the amount of successes needed to cross boundaries gets higher and higher.
Like, seriously, the fact that this year has at least 5 people with Talent 6+ is an aberration no matter how you slice it. Han Jian is the average of what you can expect from the nobility (Who you would expect to dominate a normal year). And he's not even a serious competitor in this batch. That--I think, is his actual narrative role here, to show what a 'Normal' example of the high nobility would look like so that you can compare and contrast him to the real fucking monsters that are swarming the Outer Sect in this year.
