No offense Egg, but you're numbers are pretty off. Also my personal experience has been that 5500 people tourney are never that short (7-9 hours as your structure implied).

Anyways take 5500 ( # of people) and multiply that by 1500 (starting chip stack) this = 8,250,000 (total chips in play). With me so far?

Take number of chips in play and divide that by number of people left gives you the average. So 8,250,000/50 = 165,000 per player.

If you have 50,000 chips when there are 50 people left then you are in bad shape. It's no where near ideal even if it was a lot of BBs.