You listed a few members of this Forum that actually do good job in their postings and they clearly deserve merits for their hard work but that are how many?
As of 13/04/2018, 131.060 sMerits had been awarded to 13.807 users since Merit System kick-off. So nearly 14k users have been good enough (let’s say) to get at least 1 sMerit, with an average on 10 sMerits per user in this interval of time.
What that comes to say is that a fair amount of people have received sMerit, and those that manage to become part of the merited users normally keep on getting them. We could discuss if the pace is slow or not, but it is not limited to just a few.
As a side note, the overall amount of users in the Forum is not the contrast reference for the above data, since there is an extremely large amount of inactive accounts for multiple reasons. Active users trying to gain sMerit through their regular posts (be it as a primary ambition or la secondary bonus effect) are way smaller.
How many actually got 90 Merits after starting from Member? How many got 150 after starting as Full Member? Yea I don't have numbers on that but let me guess it's less than 5% overall.
Currently, we can’t get an exact count on those figures, since the initial airdrop of sMerit is not yet public (theymos has stated that it may be released in the near future, so when that happens I’m sure someone will bring fresh food to the table).
Regardless, a good approximation is the Merit Pipeline. If we focus on those with 80% or higher amount of the amount of merit to rank up in this time, then yes, numbers are rather measly. But that is the side effect of implementing the system: It slows things down, and very few have a fast track pass to moving on at lightning speed (ok, activity speed), though many are somewhere on the path.
Does that stand as an adequate leverage against the benefits is should be bringing? Everyone will have an opinion on the answer to that, but I guess board managers are the ones who know best and will monitor and tweak the situation.
To be honest I think it's unfair to those that were active in here earlier than others and it should be possible to lose your rank over time if you don't collect merits in a certain amount of time (maybe last 120 days).
In my opinion, de-ranking people would not constitute an overall advance. Rank is really a status indicating how much of a veteran you are on the Forum, so making people “younger” by de-ranking then will be rather confusing and pointless (unless performed upon flesh and blood). If you’re talking about stepping-up Merit to a different level, and making it more important than rank (for signature campaigns let's say), well that would be a different story with many catches to it. One step a time though ..