Random Fandom Rants

33 HP Such a Big School... For Not Many

So in the movies, Hogwarts is a fucking huge castle, with a massive Quiditch pitch, that gets totally packed when a game's in progress.
And I wonder... Why does the school need that much space? It is absolutely massive, and yet, when you actually pay attention, you realise... There's not that many people actually in the school to warrant such a big castle.

So, this is how many people live in Hogwarts on a school day.
Going from Gryfindor Tower, there are 5 boys and 5 girls in each dorm.
Since Hogwarts hold 7 years, that means there is 70 people in each house.
There are 4 houses=280 students.
Plus teachers.
If S and G are taught together and HfP and RC for the complusory subjects, there needs to be at least 14 lessons going on during one class hour, thus at least 14 teachers.
Plus all the non-compulsory lessons; like Arithmantic, Ancient Runes, Divination. And people who don't teach a lesson: Hagrid in the first few years, Filch, Pince, Dumbledore.
So say there's roughly 40 teachers/adults for 280 students.

Then we have house elves. Now, to keep all of Hogwarts clean, there needs to be a lot. So it is possible that there is 200 of them as well-it does take a lot of cleaning after all.
But we don't see a lot of them around, so they must have a sufficient enough space to house them away from the 'school' as such.
So there's probably 500ish people living in there during the school term, with a bit over 300 witches and wizards, And yet, when we see the Quidditch matches, the stands are all full, so it seem like there's so many people there. But, if you look closer, you'll see each stand has only 3 rows of seats. And there's only 16 stands.

But, with only 500 people there, that's a lot of wasted space.
My high school had 600 people and it was probably the Great Hall size x3. Yes, ours wasn't a boarding school, but 2 of the houses are in a tower and one is under the ground, so you haven't really lost that much castle space even when you take those rooms away. Just looking at the square castle, without towers, or greenhouses or outbuildings, there is a hell of a lot of room there.
I mean, I can understand the size of the castle if there was 200 kids in each house, but at least in the Golden Era, it's really rather empty.

I mean, thinking about the timeline, those kids were born during the first wizarding war, so that would probably explain how it's only 280 kids there, because not many people would be having kids in a war. But that doesn't explain why there's not a rush of kids coming in after three or so years after Harry (because by then, Voldemort is gone, a year's past for the pregnancy) and that trend holding. Hogwarts should get a big baby boom in the following years, but no. It's still 40 odd new kids each year.

I can't quite figure out how this fits in with the above theories of only 300 wizards or baby booming, because I can't find any other evidence of the years being different sizes, but I was rereading PoA, and I found this in Ch15, just before the Quidditch match:
"Three-quarters of the crowd was wearing scarlet rosettes ... Behind the Slytherin goal posts, however, two hundred people were wearing green."
Slytherin has 200 people, so there must be 600 people wearing Gryffindor colours, right? So they have more than 20 people per year... So how does that work? Where did the other 130 people for each house come from? They either had a 500 strong baby boom in those two years, and it just hasn't been mentioned at all, or Harry's year is the smallest, and all the other 6 years way outnumber the third years.

And while we're on the topic of Schools...
PS and I were joking around while we were at the shops a while ago. We were talking about how the UK and America got their own schools, so what about an Australian one? What would the houses be called? And I just said "Well, let's hope that the houses were named before the 1900s, because otherwise it'll all be breweries."