Or are you actually more interested in what the various members of the community have to say about it?
Personally, I don't think this is the sort of thing that can be lumped into such narrowly defined "boxes"... You're dealing with a very subjective matter; "Post Quality".
Simply looking at "raw numbers" isn't terribly useful and to be honest, I tend to ignore all the statistical analysis threads.
The entire premise of judging a post purely on it's received merits fails when you have to consider things like:
- What is the 'normal' amount of merit for a 'good' post? 1?, 2?, 10?, 50?
- What if the person who left 1 merit, only had 1 merit to give but wanted to give more?
- What if the person who left 1 merit, had 100 merit to give, but thought it only deserved 1?
- or to put it another way, is 1 merit worth more from someone who only has 1, as opposed to 1 from a merit source who has essentially unlimited?
- do users even put a value on their merit?
- do merit sources put a value on their merit?
- if a user has a limited number of merits and sees a "merit worthy" post that has already received a number of merits, will they save their merits to give to someone else?
I see posts every day that have been sprayed liberally with merits (the thread in question is a good example)... And I think, why?
Personally, I don't think it's even worth 1. Sure the OP put some work in, but is it useful or helpful for the board/community? I don't think so.
So, simply trying to work out if a post is "good" or not based on the merits it has received is an exercise in futility.