Patterns will always exists. People do browse the forum by their interests and this has a high potential of creating merit circles/"gangs".
it always depends on the situations
a person with Legendary rank has no advantages in receiving merits, as much as in spending them to incremental the pool of reliable users (with high rank)
we always remember the reason why merits were born,
they were born to avoid account farmingtheir role stops at that (in fact in the forums dedicated to account farming they have stopped considering bitcointalk as a playground)
This is pretty normal. I guess that some very high value posters simply don't spend that much time on the forum or don't care much on meriting others. They still help.
I think I've read even about merit sources no longer being that much active. It happens...
It's also about standards. I expect some have higher standards after which they consider posts valuable, hence they probably have hard time spending their merit.
here too, I want to remind you that distributing merits is on a
voluntary basisso it's unrewarding workTheymos also said that it is subjective and not questionable how the merits are spent, indeed .. according to him it is better to spend them than to keep them
since keeping merits is useless
