This does, however, bring up a very interesting question: how is merit distributed across different sections of the forum? It would be interesting to know which sections tend to produce the most quality content in the forums. This would probably be very hard to do considering that you are getting rate limited yourself with just 500 users in the sample size in a single section of the forum, but there might be an alternative way such as scraping the last x number of posts from the section and adding up the merit from there. However, with the number of sections in the forum I can see this being extremely slow. I do not have much experience with Sheets/Excel when it comes to scraping, but I might eventually write a quick script to do it and post the results myself.
We will not get correct idea currently because of a number of reasons. Firstly, there are a number of members abusing the merit system, Some are still sending merits like 10,20 to their alts for meaningless posts. These incidences are getting reported in those threads like " report merit system abuse here" daily. Another problem is that initially most of the merits were given for pots in meta section in bulk. This data collection and analysis will be more fruitful as members get used to this new system