While this is a good statistics, but you miss one key point here, did the quality of posts increasing? Dont just see from the merit's perspective man.
This is hard to say, only the numbers are certain. The quality of the posts are relative to the person who reads them. For example (even if it is not true) looking at the numbers that are continuously decreasing I would like to say: no it is decreasing since we have less and less sMerit.
This is a 3d related to the merits and since I love the statistics I like to share my hobby and even if You do not believe it for someone it's interesting!
The point is the following: let's see when the airdropped sMerit will end so we can see if the generated sMerit from sources is enough or not for the system.
As you suggest, quantitative analysis on numerical data in feasible without too much difficulty and gives us good insights. Were things start to get rather out of reach is the measurement of the quality side to posts. As I’ve said a few times around, I favour generating Interest as the overall objective of posting over Quality. Being both subjective and often interlocked, I find quality is more of a stepping-stone towards creating a post that falls under the radar of readers, thus generating interest.
Regardless, without being so picky making the above distinction between correlated terms, to measure quality, and surpass the subjective individual opinion we all have on it, we could:
1) Perform a survey on Forum users, so as to tabulate results. This though is bound to be rather biased now days though, since quality is one of the most correlated terms we can see in posts that talk about Merit (and we know how hot and contraversary that topics is).
2) Perform semantical and structural analysis on the posts, through some sort of A.I. project (there’s an idea, though probably not original and rather complex). That would favour having an overall measure of what quality means. Imagine if the A.I. system were to be capable of revising our posts, making an automatic score based on quality. The A.I could then become a merit source if not The Merit source... wouldn't that be a treat!
From the day-to-day point of view, there’s also the Quantity factor that interferes with finding quality posts around. I went round today and awarded a few merits, but I was specifically looking for posts belonging to users lower than my rank. Unfortunately, a couple of posts that seemed to be interesting to some extent were verbatim copy/paste from the referenced news article, without any personal addition or opinion to it. To get to these, I went into all sorts of sections, scanning posts only pertaining to relatively small threads, since I generally prefer going from the top and at least skimming through all the posts within the thread.
So the quantity factor on the forum plays against the quality factor, being good posts outnumbered by bad posts and therefore, pushed back from visibility.
almost 50% less in 6 weeks 
, I did not understand why it did not rise in level, as it will play some quality post 
