Nah, I don't agree with handing out special privileges based on users who have high ranks or even high statistics. I don't think merit is the perfect option either as it was introduced as a incentive and reward system for constructive posts, but just gave that as an example for rewards. It would make much more sense for users to receive Bitcoin/altcoin what ever for their contributions somewhat like how signature campaigns are run. Though, this wouldn't be a great pay and wouldn't be anywhere near the signature campaign rates, just an incentive.

To my knowledge once posts are reported they are dealt with within a few hours at the most. Of course this depends on what time zone you are in and when the moderators are available but, judging by how quick reports are dealt with I don't think it's an issue of not having enough moderators able to act on the reports it's the fact that not a lot of people report.

Take for example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2166379.msg21740582#msg21740582

If we have a look at the last 120 days from that update we have some very big drops between users. Generally speaking if we had more users reporting then we would probably not see such big drops. I'm not trying to make those who had reported the lesser amounts on that list sound bad either 50 posts is awesome in the last 120 days, but I think if we had a list of the top 100 we would see a few users only reporting a couple of reports in 120 days. This is based on assumption, but that's why it would be nice to have a response on how many reports are posted a day and how many of those are good reports. If there's a lot of posts which are bad then it might be beneficial to post a topic with advise on reports.