To me, what is immediately clear with these trees is the number of merits that are "lost" being sent to users not circulating their received merits.
There are much more sMerits "lost" by Merit sources who don't empty their source completely (myself included in the past months). So if I'd send 50 sMerit to satoshi (which I'm not planning to do, but bear with me for the sake of argument), there's not a single sMerit lost from circulation. If I don't send them, they "expire" because they won't be replenished 30 days later.
From a Merit source's perspective, sMerit isn't scarce. So I can just as well Merit good posts from inactive users.
I reiterate the concept that everyone is free to find their best meriting strategy and I don't want to judge anything.
From my point of view, the first meriting criterion is the effort put into writing a post, hence a post from an active user is worth being merited. And a lot of Hal and Satoshi posts are extremely worth it in this sense.
The second criterion I take into account is the possibility that my sMerits become sMerits again down the "Merits tree".
In this case, I tend to give more merits I know will spend their sMerits.
This is just me.
I don't think sending merits to an inactive user is better, from an aggregate point of view, than letting my merit source sMerits expire.
For sure I am trying my best to exhaust my sMerits allocation every month, as a Merit source I think it is one of my "duties" toward the forum. Again, not using this as a measure of "worthiness".
