Sheriam is one of the very strongest AS in the Tower. In fact there are only maybe a dozen women (aside from the Forsaken) that are stronger than she is!

Alanna and Verin are barely slightly average strength as we saw from Merana. At best they are the bottom of the strongest 1/3 of AS (meaning there are close to 250 women stronger than them ... not a handful.

Of course the Kin are weaker. Think of why most of them ARE IN THE KIN and not AS ... lack of strength! As Alise says on any number of occasions, "I am to WEAK to be AS". In fact after the first flurry of very strong Kin the vast majority are very weak. Do some math here to figure out how strong Verin and Alanna are ... generally speaking they are the weakest women who can make a useable gateway on their own. Add together 3 or 4 Kin who are not strong enough to be AS who can match what Verin and Alanna can do (with the linking precision bonus) and that means Verin is roughly 2x the strength of the weakest AS. Couple that with the fact that Siuan was once more than 3x the weakest AS and you can see that Verin and Alanna are between the half way and 2/3 point of current AS Strength (Lelaine/Romanda down to Daigian).

I am not saying Egwene didn't say it, I'm saying she said it before there was real information on how Traveling worked. Her claim that "only a handful of them are strong enough" is proven wrong over and over ... we've seen dozens of AS with the strength to Travel ... it's not much different than Moiraine's early assertions in the series ... how many of those turned out to be incorrect on her part? Again, just because a character makes an observation doesn't mean that it's correct. There are hundreds of cases in the text where characters are 100% wrong in their observations.