I very much doubt they’d shrink 65,536 to 40,000, even if some of the values were indistinguishable from others. That’s not how marketing works! If you have a 3×9 gear combination on a bicycle, you call it 27 gears, never mind that a lot of it is overlap and that it’s even possible for some ratios to be identical (e.g. 26:9 and 52:18 is conceivable).