I've thought about this too. I mainly read boards that are interesting for me, and indeed, they don't seem to have a lack of merit around there.
Start exploring boards that are of no interest to you, maybe you'll have a better shot at things. Search for the land deprived of merit and weave that board into your own circus of merit dancing monkeys.
Then again, without any official word, we can only guess. I know
more people are waiting, and that list was only updated by theymos once, a few days after merit was introduced.
There should be a more systematic way to track the progress of your application. Simple notices of acknowledgement, review, refusal or delay in processing would be a pleasant implementation. I can see that this would add more work, but the current methods seem to be leaving threads like yours to accumulate thousands of views only to leave us all in suspense.
I'm wondering if there are any merit sources with a negative trust rating from a DT member. I haven't given myself the couple minutes to check, but did his negative trust or his merit resignation come first? I wasn't around for that day, or those couple of days, it's been a busy past month. I've missed a lot of the nuance and inner-workings of these issues.