That doesn't surprise me. Relatively speaking, there are not a lot of people that put in the time to reach level nine. Once they have, sainthood seems finally in reach and there is some motivation to try to sprint through that last 700 XP.

Actually, I think this is an unnecessary level of psychoanalysis. At the present moment, there are 184 monks with 2300 or more XP. Leaving aside vroom for the moment (for obvious reasons) their XP totals range from 2311 to 29341. Even assuming a strongly left-skewed distribution (which is a reasonable assumption) it isn't really to be expected that a majority of that population will be in the left-most 700 XP of that 27030-XP range.

(Generation of a statistical comparison of this population to the overall Perlmonks population is left as an exercise to the reader, assuming the reader has some time on his hands.)