It's hard to not see the Jedi as godly when you spend all day writing fanfiction about them doing backflips and lightsabering dudes in half and never facing any consequences, because being a Jedi is exactly the same as being a ninja with a license to kill, right?

Seriously, though,http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/MILITARY/rg1101.pdf"> here's another reason I can't buy only 10,000 Jedi having that much influence. There are more than 10,000 officers ranked Colonel (Captain for you Navy people) and above in the US armed forces. As we know from The Clone Wars, all the Jedi were ranked at least this high (even though Padawans held a rank equivalent to Lt. Colonel, the mundane officers always always ALWAYS deferred to the orders of a Jedi, so Padawans essentially count as a higher rank than what they actually held in the Clone Army), and as we known from TVTropes, Colonels are badasses. But 10,000 colonels is enough to populate the upper command of just one army on the planet Earth--even if we rounded them all up to generals, that would maybe be enough generals for one planet, not an entire galaxy.

Part of this issue is Lucas not understanding just how freaking HUGE the Galaxy he created really is. Based on atlases of the GFFA, it's larger than the Milky Way, and has billions of inhabited worlds with trillions of sentient lifeforms living on them. But numbers that big make people stupid, because all of the zeroes start blending together, so the Galaxy becomes the size of Earth in people's minds, and 10,000 Colonel Badasses is plenty for one planet!

(Another real-world example: the German Army was strictly limited to an army of 100,000 men after the Treaty of Versailles. What the Germans did was they let go of all of their soldiers, but kept all of their commissioned officers--then, when they decided to re-arm, they already had enough experienced officers around to command a large army, so they were able to mobilize quickly. But again, that's just one country--and they had ten times the officers the Jedi had.)