Two passages are in particularly worthy of note in considering the droid/clone army size schism between Traviss and Saxton. This article, along with the short story Odds, by Karen Traviss, seem to be the closest to being official in-universe retcons of the AOTC:ICS droid figures.
Odds, as is well-known by now, is a Traviss short story that suggests that the quadrillons/quintillions figures spouted in the ICS are misinformation that was officially propagated within the Star Wars universe by people with an interest in overstating the droid army, and that the actual droid figures are many orders of magnitude lower (annual production figures more like 100 million).
General Grievous: Lord of War is, unsurprisingly, by someone other than Traviss (writing clones has been her specialty) - Abel G. Peña.
These three sentences in one stroke acknowledge the quintillions favored by the pro-ICS crowd, and then substitute a much lower figure for actual fighting droids:
With 1500 active droid fighters assigned to each battleship according to other EU sources, that leaves room for a very large CIS navy, actually, but still, only "billions" of groundpounding battledroids?With several quintillions of droids by the close of the Clone Wars, the number of robotic troops at his disposal played out in Grievous' imagination like a barely fathomable string of trinary code. Certainly, more than a billion of these battle droids were vulture droids and tri-fighters, spacebound and largely consigned to the Confederacy navy. But without even including biological conscripts and militias from Confederacy worlds (including the insuperable Mandalorian Protectors who ravaged the Kamino cloning facilities ), that still left billions of mechanized infantry, tank droids, hailfire droids and other monstrous Separatist automata to oppose the Republic's ground forces.
And this sentence:
Only hundreds of millions of battle droids? A significant fraction, in other words, of the billions of infantry, fighters, tanks, and other violent "automata."In the Battle of Coruscant alone, hundreds of millions of battle droids saw action on the ground and in space.
By what measure could we consider the ICS droid army figures to have not been retconned away?