One individual anecdote also doesn't really disprove his claim that merit is concentrated in Meta and in limited social groups. From my observation, I'm guessing he's right about that, but I don't have any forum-wide statistics to point to. Has anyone scraped stats to look at the actual distribution among sub-forums?
Here's one data point:
Mostly all from Meta or otherwise merit/forum ranking-related (i.e. meta threads in other boards). I don't see any technical threads.
Like I said, it's sort of expected that merit will be concentrated in community-oriented boards like Meta. But maybe we can be realistic about the system's limitations...