Side-Note, why do you think they seem to come in batches of acceptance rather than one at a time? That behooves me a bit, unless theymos sets aside a particular chunk of time to bang out a bunch of applications and always manages to find multiple sources within that pile.
I too can only guess 
This was based on two things:
1. Madz' Unofficial merit source application thread got processed once:
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2. I've seen the number of Merit sources jump up by large numbers a few times (although it went from 79 to 80 too).
2. I've seen the number of Merit sources jump up by large numbers a few times (although it went from 79 to 80 too).