I'm kind of thinking that in order for the merit source thingie ma jiggie to work with fewer glitches (especially in the begging arena), there may be a need for theymos to designate nearly one thousand members as merit sources..

Perhaps, theymos is working his way up to that 1000 number.. , but only slowly.. hahahahaha..   He started with 35 merit sources, and currently there are 77.. so could be more and more and more?  There is likely a decent amount of analysis going into how merits are being distributed. and whether the new system is going to allow for both ranking up and disincentivizing spam-like posts...