This is such an awesome work... yes, you actually helped me a lot to understand the statistics and how merits are distributed. Taking a look at your last graphic, it seems like the ANN board is well-merited. I was just interested in that because I've seen a lot of people complaining about the merit system, and I couldn't understand why.
Well, the numbers are speaking: under my interpretation, actually, the ANN board is the most merited, but also one of the harder places to obtain any merit. So, please, correct me if I'm wrong: the most merited board - in relation with the number of posts, of course- is Meta, followed by Development and Technical Discussion and Bitcoin technical support? I'm not a number genius, but it seems that the merits per board actually are speaking about the system as a pretty fair one. I mean: the boards that actually are concerned about the forum and in which the most interesting threads, the most helpful ones and also the most informative one -like this one- are then the most merited per post.

So I guess that everytime the people write: "you need to create an informative and helpful post in order to get some merit" they can actually demonstrate it by using this very stats.  Somehow I did read this statement so many times, that it began to sound quite like a cliché and I was also asking myself if there is any way to demonstrate it. But, actually, there is one. 

On the other hand, this is kind of disturbing how many deleted posts are being merited -this information belongs to your other amazing post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4932684.0  - and also how the ANN section can be actually using merit as a way of payment? Of course, I'm sure there are a lot of informative threads deserving merits on this one, but, I couldn' t find many so far, so, can we speak about two different ways of using merits?:
1.- Like actually a recognition.
2.- Like an asset: people giving merits to others in order to receive something in return?