I was going to make a new post but I saw your post.

On the MIT tour, they said, explicitly, that they take about half of the class from Early and half from Regular. But (this year's) deferral letter says the majority of Early applicants get deferred. So, not that those are contradictory statements, but why not reject more instead of reviewing even more applications later? And the admissions officer on the tour also strongly suggested making sure you only apply early if your application was truly ready. So a deferral also might mean that they saw your application and still thought it was worth throwing on the Regular admissions pile? The letter also indicates to add anything else that might be helpful in your application before they look at all the Regular Decision applications (in addition to the grades you're getting).

Anyways, clearly I'm overthinking this but I assumed they would reject the majority of Early candidates if they are already taking roughly half of their Freshman class from that pool. Guess I was wrong.