Right now it probably doesn't matter what the statistics are on leveling up beyond "member" for the community. What will be more important, is taking a general span of time (let's give the merit system 3-6 months), then analyze the overall forum quality, and if leveling up has actually occurred like it should have for strong contributions.

After that we can take all these Meta suggestions and see how to improve this system. We are after all only on the first release of this feature.