Well, working over your last comment M.J. - maybe they are trying to make it look less urgent because they are not so sure of themselves r.e. time of the end and remaining annointed anymore.
It would seem to me that of those 8500 there can only be three "classes" of annointed in 2006 - working by their own twisted logic as near as I can decipher it:
type one: the "legitimate" sealed class - they were witnesses old enough to be baptized pre 1935 (the sealing) and have remained so and are presumably free from sin and have thus not fallen away. I would say that these need to be someone born about 1914 so that they could have been 21 by 1935. Note that you could hardly be more than about 10 years older than that and still be around. Nathan's chronology research says that this group should be diminished almost to vanishing by now. You also have to believe that there were at least 9000 of the total annointed in 1935 who were only 21 or so - ???
type two: the "legitimate-replacement" class - assuming that a few "legitimate" sealed ones messed up and stayed that way until death; maybe a very few could get picked to replacement status (to themselves) stand the test. I say that it is a great stretch of imagination to claim that any significant percentage could fall into this category. Otherwise, almost all the survivors from type one have sinned themselves into oblivion - and surely this would have been an obvious scandal which could not have been hidden.
type three: the "bogus" class - if you are not type one or type two your presence in the 8500 count cannot be explained.
And, yet this number has gone down by only a few hundred over the past 20 years.
To me, the implications are obvious. Wonder if they secretly are to the GB also?
James