I think there was a similar discussion last year as well, when Rainer Viertlbock and Michael Ezra were prizewinners and Andre had four HM's.
Having a little spare time this morning, I did some checking on the IPA Gallery site. There are a total of 3705 HM's in the Pro section. My entry was in the Landscape Pro category, in which there were 161 HM's. Many entries had HM's in multiple categories. I'd certainly like to know how many entries there were in total, but I seriously doubt all the entries got HM's, or that there were only 3,705 (plus the winners) entries. Considering the promotion the IPA does, and the number of multiple entries (same image in multiple categories, and multiple entries by the same photographer), that sounds unlikely. Would 15/20,000 be a reasonable number? There are obvious flaws in the organization of this competition like the number of categories, overlapping categories, entering the same image in multiple categories and the sheer number of HM's. But people like Ed Kashi, Kiran Master, Tim Griffith, Satyaki Ghosh and Nadav Kander, to mention a few of my favorite photographers, also won HM's this year and have been regular entrants. I guess I'm in good company!
And they have real heavyweights on the jury, so it's always good to get your name out. You never know where a concatenation of circumstances might lead you.
Kumar