Anyway, good luck convincing theymos for this. 
That seems not to be an easy task in such cases.
Don't worry about it, I'm in no rush, and I have hundreds if not thousands of spammers helping me to convince theymos That seems not to be an easy task in such cases.
You should probably be in no rush because even after having thousands of spammers, it would still take some time to convince theymos to take a step ahead
Be patient, and let the spammers do their convincing work. I think it is better to make the 1 merit requirement a tougher one.
It is already tough for the ones who have no support to push them ahead, and the excessive amount of posts regarding this and the efforts of getting a Merit by creating threads in Meta has already proved that.
It would be too much to ask the genuine users to wait too long to rank up just one step. So it is much better to just keep demoting the one's who don't deserve to rank up and let the ones who deserve it keep going ahead.