Quoted from Aurich:I don't know how they do it. But if I was doing it I'd print/stamp/engrave/whatever all 500 at once, put them in a bin, and pull one out every time I finished a game and needed an LE plaque.
Making them all at once is obvious, nobody is hand making each one as the games are done, but I can't see any sense in them being in some carefully managed numerical order so each one is added sequentially. What would be the point?
So my guess is your number is random, and not indicative of how many have been made or build order.
I do think there is a SKU that they associate to the given number (e.g. #490/500), as I feel like I have seen correlations in either my serial number or something in interactions with Stern. So, I don’t think the plaques are just random with no record of which one is on which machine.
Agree though that there does appear to be some non-sequential builds, so there may be some other system that just randomly tells them which plaque to grab for the machine they are working on.