It’s sad to see the scarcity of candidates on this thread to @Pmalek’s initiative, plus the proven inadequacy of some of those postulants. You can’t really put it any easier than on this thread.

This kind of proves by example (therefore not an empirical rule though) that the amount of Newbie accounts that are willing to place a bit of real effort into earning a single merit is scarce in comparison to the number of Newbie accounts. Likely, those that are decent posters enough do not have too much trouble getting merit themselves on their usual posting routes.