Well, I got it wrong - after looking briefly at the code and deciding there was now way I was going to try to make sense of such an ill-formated mess, feeling flabbergasted at the misuse of a recursive CTE to generate a tally table, and concluding that the where clause indicated that all I had to do was count the dots and add 1 unless it was a trck question and the code was going to return an error instead of any rows (and there was no way I was going to syntax-check anything with that layout, so assume no error) I counted the dots wrong (by leaving out the firstline - I had scrolled it off th top of my window and forgot about it).

I hate code with unneeded complexity, especially when it's layed out so as to obscure its structure. I hate code that burns CPU cycles as if they were going out of fashion. It's a good question in that it does demonstrate that the select list is irrelevant when counting rows. It's a bad question in that it demonstrates a way that code should never be written.