As I said before remove the top 300 (circle and those desperate to enter the circle) and the circlers fav sub board meta board and you will see people lose average of 80% or greater some over 90%.
So remove all the merit sources, and remove one of the least spammy boards, and people will have less merit. I'm not sure why you think this is some big scandal or conspiracy.
Incidentally, if you take r1s2g3's data, sum the "Total Merit" column, sum the "Merits in Meta" column, divide the two and multiply by 100, the result is 26.9%. Even if you remove the 50 profiles who have earned zero merits in meta, the number is still only 33.9%.