My main concern would be the decreasing total amount of weekly circulating sMerit, and the number of people that receive them. The numbers seem to have shrunk back rapidly to figures similar to the pre-change of rules and additional merit sources. There is a difficult equilibrium to maintain here between post quality, the number of people who can rank-up, and the number of people active on the forum on the whole.

Regarding awarding merits to Legendries, I see no issue with it. Merit is a magnitude to express recognition for post quality/interest, and therefore it should only be natural that one should not place a barrier to favour/disfavour by rank alone, but rather by the post’s content. One may apply a different criteria to some extent though according to rank (i.e. be less demanding on Newbies/Jr. Members).
Arguably, Legendries do not require merit to rank-up, but since it is also (mainly) a means to recognize their contribution through their posts, then no one should be restricted from that.

Note: As we’ve talked about privately, the data on the Dashboard concerning number of ranked-up members is not wrong. The date filter on the Ranked_up Tab applies to the account creation date, not the actual date that the account ranked-up upon (the latter would require to backtrack TX by TX to find the associated dates of ranking-up, and I have not endeavoured that task on the Dashboard or elsewhere).