No offence, but ever since i registered into this forum i have been observing some trend in this forum regarding the rewarding of merit to deserving post.
None taken, and you have been here for just too little time till now. Plus making a thread about merit in meta. You are not getting any merits for this.

One thing that i have observed is that Legendary members award themselves high number of merits even to any ordinary reply by his/her colleague makes on a topic. i am not against awarding merits to each other if it is deserving but i am just saying it is quite unfair to reward a fellow Legendary member high number of merits for just an ordinary post when another member can make a whole lot of research and just receive some few number of merits.
Life is unfair get used to it. If you still feel that its unfair you should leave the forum. Or you can try sending some "Merit Broke My Life! Halp Sir" PMs to theymos but Im not sure if you are going to get any reply at all.
I know someone may bring this arguement that any individual can give merit according to his/her discretion but the point is Legendary members are not ranking up to any further rank so why dash them that huge number of merits when there are other lower rank members who equally deserve to rank up with some quality post of theirs.
Because older members here put in some effort to make posts. It is beyond the comprehension of a tiny brained spammer who comes to the forum to spam for bucks but for those who care about the forum for them the good posts catch the eye even if the newbies try to make worthy posts because they have been here for a longer time now. 99% of the posts in any thread by newbies dont even have any reading value.