I love statistics, because depending on the assumption, you can prove almost everything

You say: "40% of all Legendary outgoing transactions were towards Legendary and Hero members"

I say: Legendary gives almost equal merit amount to Members, Full Members, Senior Members and Hero Members, and they also give almost the same amount of for low ranked users (Newbies, Juniors and Members) - 23,45% as for other Legendary 26,10%

You say: "50% of Full member outgoing transactions were towards members and full members"
I say: Full Members gives the same amount of merits to lower ranked members - Juniors and Members 41,13% as to semi ranked - Full Members and Seniors 41,96%

I can also say that:
Hero Members gives almost equal amount of merits to Legendary, Senior Members, Full Members and Members... What's interesting here: each lower rank gets more merits than higher one...

Junior Members give just the same amount to Newbies - 4,54% as to Legendary - 4,54%....

and so on....

So you showed how only injustice of Merit system I see in the same data that it is not so bad...

Of course as it was said may times it's not perfect... probably it's also not very good... For sure there some abuses, there are guys who give more merits to their friends than to others especially newbies (just like in real life), native English speakers are favored (although this is global forum)...  but for sure it can't be said that merits are held by few guys who don't let anyone into their table...