It would be very helpful to draw conclusions if we knew the breakdown on the demographics of your data. I would be able to draw some conclusions or at least ask some questions if I knew what % of your analyzed users were pertaining to which rank. It seems Newbies and Jr. ranked members have taken home a disproportionate amount of merit, but of course this would be dependent upon how many were included in the data.

The lower ranks have much lower merit per user, but a much higher % of total merit and I'm wondering why this is the case. It is obvious that there are more of them, but I wonder if this is indicative of anything deeper. I wonder why Members are averaging more than Full and Senior, unless there is a significant outlier skewing the data.

We're going to have to give merit a lot longer before we see all of the initial effects fade away and actually see how it will function long-term.