I just quickly gone through with merit dashboard and found out that there are 44 Hero members still didn't sent any sMerit from their initial airdrop of 1000 Merits and also there are 44.133 Merits (around 22K sMerits) hoarding by those 44 Hero Members alone.
The airdrop was 500 for 95% of the Hero members, not 1000, and i'm pretty sure the sMerit that was received from the airdrop was absolutely
not a 2:1 ratio. (So 500 Merit ≠ 250 sMerit.) It was wayy less.
I didn't say those 44 members were Hero Members at the time of introduction of merit system but now. They were most probably Legendary at that time and they all got 1000 airdrop merits according to the merit dashboard. You can simply go to the merit dashboard and check with the ranking up pipe line and they still got those 1000 merits in their pockets without spending any at all.
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So the most you could get is if you were a Legendary who maxed out your activity points in the last year, in which case you would get 1 * 0.4 * 1000 = 400 sMerit.
Here we go.. that means those 44 most probably have
nearly 17k unspent sMerits.
I agree. If anything, merit sources should be able to delegate sMerits to others so that their unused merits could allow someone else to give more merits.
This is what Jet Cash already suggested as dMerits (delegate merits). He already done a trial with @seon by giving away his 10 source Merits to help with Spanish local board and it all goes well. Sometimes merit sources not having enough time to going through every boards for looking posts which truly deserved to be merited. Because I have recently seen that one of the merit source already started a thread in Meta by asking how he should spent his source Merits.
So deligating a apperentice for spent unused merits wouldn't be a bad idea at all. But those delegate merits shouldn't been added to the total merit count of the apprentice of merit source.