For the majority of those who consider Ranking important to themselves, ranking-up speed is pretty slow and the perspective is to take quite a long time to manage to move on to their next rank, especially for those in the mid-to-high ranks. I recently took a look at the ranking-pipeline, and summarized it here: re: Isn't this merit thing getting more monopolistic politics? (a more detailed vision can be obtained using the Merit Dashboard) -> Go to the "Ranking-up" pipe-line tab).

For example, under the Merit system, 24 people have managed to rank-up to Hero Member status, but there are currently:

-   1.137 Sr. Members that have the activity and lack merit to get to Hero
        11 have >= 80% of the require merits
        89 have 60..80% of the required merits
        1.037 have 40..60% of the required merits (that is, not much more than the airdropped amount at best).
-   12 that have the merits but lack the activity
-   5 that are nearly there
-   801 that lack both activity and merit.

Now obviously ranking-up is now not a freebie that comes with just posting, but that now requires a certain degree of decent content as a fellow companion. Depending on the board sections one posts in, the path to ranking-up can be more cumbersome (specially on local boards).

On my local board there are a few posters that create good enough content and I regularly merit them because of that content (not because a particular shine to them nor local board patriotism of the sort). I tend to merit them with a few merits on the posts that I see fit, but not with a large amount.
In the past I’ve seen some large amounts being awarded and having reputational issues due to that, so I normally stick to awarding lower amounts per-se. A sudden 15 or 20 merit award on a single post would look odd there, and the help I can manage to give them is by reading their posts and awarding a few merits to each one that I consider worthy of it. It may also stimulate to keep on posting good content, but over a fair share of posts.