I don’t particularly like the idea of being able to purchase sMerits, even if those allowed to do so were cherry-picked by the Admins and/or Merit Sources. Essentially, the wrong message could be read on the forum, whereby some privileged people were purchasing Merits (the word-of-mouth would probably spread that Merits were being purchased, not sMerits).
An easier to sell concept would be something like this:
<…> A concept such as a delegate merit source may help. @Jet Cash used the term "dMerits" back in 2018, and the idea would build on top of that: Allow for Merit Sources to designate 1 Delegate Merit Source, and transfer a percentage of their own allowance (sMerits; not having to merit them first so they could sMerit others).
The idea behind being that you’d have more eyes on the board, derive new sources through delegation (delegating therefore the required conceptual trust on level down the chain). Of course it may not be ideal, since the Merit Source and delegate may roam the same boards and perhaps have similar meriting likes. <…>
The above idea would easily fit the narrative of more people acting as Merit Sources (albeit by delegation), having no buy/sell ties to the concept, but rather extending the idea of trust as a basis (the Merit Source trusts the dMerit Source enough to pass on a certain amount of sMerits to another person).
The board rules may need to be given a thought (i.e. only applies to Merits Sources above with a certain threshold of sMerit – not the smaller ones), but it doesn’t seem like something too complicated from a conceptual point of view.