I think it will take a lot of time before that happens. Note that we have a lot of unused accounts that are being taken over by hackers. Those are mostly people who had accounts here before the database leak. Now these accounts can be used to spam merit till the end of days. I'm pretty sure it's already being done.
The amount of sMerit received at the start of the merit system, depends on rank and how active the account was in the previous year. I can't find back the link, but I think around 600,000 sMerits were available to give away on January 25th. On a total of
887,673 active accounts, that's only enough to rank up a small fraction of users.