I forget how many members bitcointalk has, but I think it's over a million or so. If we don't even have 100 merit sources, there are definitely not going to be enough to give sufficient merit to those who deserve it.
BPIP shows 376,866 active accounts, which means they've logged in within the past 3 months. But only
19453 accounts have received 1 or more Merit points. Many of these got it through Merit abuse.
I think it's an optimistic estimate to say that only a few thousand accounts deserve to rank up, and that would still take one order of magnitude more sMerit than sources currently generate.
Based on this, I'd say more sources would be needed. I have seen a few users with more Merit than Activity, which means the best of the best aren't restricted by Merit, but I think anybody who isn't a spammer shouldn't be limited by Merit either.
I occasionally see some application threads getting bumped from months ago, so I have a feeling that it's not Theymos's priority or that he doesn't think more are needed.
It took me 3 months of daily bumps and many endorsements to become a Merit source. Since then, the total number of sources went up from
80 to
84. That's about 1 new Merit source per month.