I use a very similar table as @Piggys, with exactly the same number of records: 29.039.Those 29.039 people in the table are those involved in a sMerit TX at any point in history. That is, those that have either sent sMerit, receives sMerit, or both.
This makes sense. It also means my initial assumption that I expected much higher numbers was correct.
I could quite easily produce a complete list of all higher ranked accounts with no Merit, especially since the number of accounts involved will never go up again, but I don't really want to download 2.5 million profiles just for this. It doesn't feel right to download 120 GB from the forum for something that isn't really important.
Maybe @Vod can provide a list of all user ranks since the Merit system, it would be easy to cross-reference this list with the list of merit receivers.