First of all, I would like to congratulate OP for entering in Top 1000 of users with most earned merits. Being in first 1000 users out of 3.408.251 is a big achievement!
Second of all, I have to say that I share, in part, The Pharmacist's view:
If you're in the top 1000 merit earners with only (and I don't mean to belittle your merit earning) 160 merits, then I'd guess that most of the merits in existence belong to the profiles of a relatively small number of members. Crazy, isn't it?
A while ago I made a suggestion to make rank-up more difficult. But seeing that
with only 159 merits you can enter in Top 1000 made me think again. Perhaps some can earn merits very easy, but as it seems almost all the other can not.
There are almost 3.5M users. I saw somewhere someone saying that only 100.000 are active. Even so, Top 1000 represents then the 1%. If we think what represents the Top 1000 out of ~3.5M, then the percentage is that small that even Windows' calculator (set on scientific mode!) calculates with an error. What I'm trying to say is that reaching Top 1000 should be priceless. Yet you can reach it only with 159 merits. I haven't looked at these stats for a while now (probably I did it in the past and I don't remember) and I think I lived with the idea that reaching Top 1000 (of most earned merits) would require much more merits. Maybe 400-500... but things are different, as it can be seen.
I am not under-appreciating those which reached the top with 159+ merits, don't misunderstand me. What I'm saying here is that I am shocked to see how difficult must be for
All these make me wonder why is this situation happening though? Merit sources are more now than in the past. Their sMerits "bags" are larger than they used to, as the initial ones were recently replaced with bigger ones. Yet, users are still unable to obtain merits... Why?
A while ago I made a suggestion - to have merit sources dedicated to lower ranks. This situation makes me think again about that suggestion of mine. Maybe this way more users can be helped...? And, unless all 3,399M users, excepting those from Top 1000, are shit posters - which I think it's impossible - then I don't see how it's possible for all the forum to confront with such situation, which is like a barrier for obtaining merits...