I did see that "quickie" merit give away happen from QA on the WO thread within a short time of it happening, and even though I thought that such giveaway was a bit random, I would NOT have thought that by itself such random give away would have risen to the level of removing merit source status.

Of course, there is a certain level of full and complete discretion that an owner (such as theymos) has regarding merit source status - meaning that he does NOT even really need a reason to change or remove such status.... hahahahahaha.... but anyhow, assuming that the merit source removal was QA, unless theymos shared his rationale, none of us would really know if there may have been a multitude of factors (besides just the seemingly random WO thread give away), and the one incident (or handful of incidents that we might be able to identify) would have merely served as marginal facts (the straw that broke the camel's back type) to push theymos into such a merit source removal decision (again assuming that it was QA).

By the way, regarding the level of source merit status, I would have thought that theymos would engage in a bit of a predetermination about granting such high level of smerit sources to any member (such as prescreening) for a member who has a really high amount of smerits to distribute (such as 1000 every 30 days) because it can be quite a bit of work and seeming responsibility to be able to attempt to fairly distribute that many smerits every 30 days.  

Just on a personal level, sometimes I just error on the side of giving smerits that I am thinking that the member or the post might not really deserve the smerit, but the post and the member is kind of the "best thing that I see at the moment," so I just send the smerit.. which ends up rising to the level of a charity merit or could be kind of considered as a random smerit give away.... so even a random distribution, such as the one that QA did does seem to go a step or two further than  my kind of charity distribution of smerit, it does not even seem like a bad thing to engage in some randomness, once in a while - but I suppose such scale of randomness creates a worse impression if it is announced as a random smerit distribution and also that so many smerits end up being sent to some members who just happened to be in the right place at the right time... which then might cause other non-receiving members to feel a bit disgruntled about the whole seemingly random incident.