Wow what a nice statistic you got there, i guess this is not a hard job if it is done by an experienced manager.
This statistic really negate all the whiners who said that merits not given in some section and only meta's people getting a lot of merits. I dont know how does people's brain works if they are still denying the facts while we got some nice statistics here.
This is actually really interesting. While I do believe that there are some valuable posts in the altcoin section and by some altcoin bounty hunters, I think it is rather obvious that a lot of spam happens in the section and I do not believe it is as strictly moderated than the rest of the forum especially with all the coin pumping going on in there. This is mostly the main reason I try to stay away from it.
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.
If you interested on finding out how the no 1 merit giver merit distributed, you can find it here on my thread
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2947171.msg30272338#msg30272338 , but i made it about 4 days ago, so it is not an updated version, but it can gives you a glimpse on merit distribution based on board.
I just took a look at your post and it is truly amazing. I was actually very surprised to find that the board with the highest amount of merit sent was Bitcoin Discussion, but at the same time, it is the most popular subreddit as well. I would have believed that the merit density of the subforum would be pretty bad considering all of the megathread spamposts in there. In fact, this might still be true since your data is based on raw data rather than merit over posts, which would also be a very interesting metric to explore. Furthermore, it would also be interesting to analyze the same statistics if any
of giving merit is given a value of 1 rather than the number of merit given in that instance. This might help prevent the data from being skewed towards alts.