The classification and enumeration of short mesh patterns have emerged as two central directions in the area. We make substantial progress on both fronts. We construct an involution and a bijection that establish distributional equivalences for two classes of length-$2$ mesh patterns, thereby resolving a conjecture from 2019 and a recent conjecture. As a consequence, the best known upper bounds for the numbers of distribution-equivalence and Wilf-equivalence classes drop to $106$ and $47$, respectively. Combined with the known lower bounds of 105 and 46, conjectured to be exact, these results leave both classifications hinging on a single distribution-equivalence question conjectured in 2019, whose resolution would at once settle the remaining Wilf-equivalence case. We further conjecture that this unresolved equidistribution also holds for involutions, a subclass of all permutations. We also determine the distributions of three additional classes of length-$2$ mesh patterns through a detailed structural analysis. Our work combines bijective techniques with generating-function methods, yielding new insights into the structure and enumeration of short mesh patterns.