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I agree with you that ranking up is more difficult than ever but your own statistic shows it clearly that lower ranked persons struggle even more with ranking up because of lack of merits.
Why? Are their posts that much worse than hero/legendary members? I don't think so. It's just nuances.
It's more because they reach activity limit much faster. Within 60days/5x2week cycle from M to FM compared to 240days from SrM to HM.
In addition, some higher ranked members know each other and trust them more and are therefore more tempted to give merits to those. No, that's not an accusation of Merit exchange, just a subjective opinion.

You listed a few members of this Forum that actually do good job in their postings and they clearly deserve merits for their hard work but that are how many?
How many actually got 90 Merits after starting from Member? How many got 150 after starting as Full Member? Yea I don't have numbers on that but let me guess it's less than 5% overall.
To be honest I think it's unfair to those that were active in here earlier than others and it should be possible to lose your rank over time if you don't collect merits in a certain amount of time (maybe last 120 days).