I'll see how things are in a month or two and think about it. Basically, the "ideal new user" should be able to easily and without any particular "merit farming" be able to far exceed the merit requirements; for them, activity should be the limiting factor. If this is not achievable, then I absolutely will make tweaks until that goal is reached. But it's too early to say at this point.
I did consider a 1-point requirement for Member when designing the system, but I thought it might be too easy. We'll see.
I would keep it like that.
You need to do 60 posts (in a total of 5 differet periods, which is equal to 2 months) to have the activity necessary to become a Member. IMO getting 10 merits in 2 months should be fairly easy if you are not one the users making empty posts just to increase your activity (i.e, 90% of the Bitcoin Discussion board), which is sadly the majority of the users complaining about the new merit system.
I myself (and a lot of users) already got ~20 merits since the release of the merit sytem 3 days ago. And I doubt it was just because I'm already a Hero Member and people read my posts "unlike the Jr. Member posts" which are supposedly "mostly ignored".