hey, just trying to liberate the developer on this one 
there is a free mac application called “word counter” (intel and ppc) that will run clean word counts from any application (bbedit, whatever else)
what’s really nice is that since scrivener can output an rtf, you can simply drag the rtf onto the wordcounter and get your count…or you can cut and paste
YES this involves an extra step or two, but it’s totally free and well executed…has auto updates on counts at set intervals, can be set to ignore words below a certain number of characters and so on…
available for download as an application at: http://www.supermagnus.com/mac/Word_Counter/index.html
or as a widget (with all the same features) at:
http://www.supermagnus.com/mac/wordcounterwidget/index.html
(the widget can also help you find redundancies)
from the dev:Word Counter is a Macintosh OS X application that performs a word count and a character count. It can work alone or in conjunction with Apple’s own TextEdit application via a small floating window. Text can be typed, pasted, or dragged into the window. Word Counter can handle various file types including plain text (txt, text), rich text (rtf, rtfd), Hypertext Markup Language (htm, html), Microsoft Word (doc), Microsoft Word XML (wordml), and Apple’s web archives (webarchive). Word Counter can automatically update the count based on a user-definable time interval. It also can perform bulk counts on multiple files and folders simply by dropping them onto the window. This program may be useful for writing a paper or an abstract that sets a specific limit on the number of words or characters allowed.