That might just be the issue. At least publicly there hasn't been enough users applying to become a merit source.
After seeing how long it took LoyceV to be accepted and even then it was only after digaran quit, I came to the conclusion that there weren't any vacancies. I hope I'm wrong as I do really think there are too few people assigned too much work. It would work far better if there were twice as many merit sources with half as much sMerit each.
I think Theymos doesn’t care much (and maybe he hasn’t much time either) because with the current sources exceptional posters rank up according to activity. They usually get merits before their reach the required activity.
The problem is for ok-posters and good ones. It will take longer for them to rank up than it will take to reach the required activity but that doesn’t seem much of an issue.
What I would expect are some changes to improve the system because many proposals have been made on this board but none of them have been implemented and although the system has had an impact on the forum there is still a lot of spam and shitposting.