Trust and DT is the current 'talk of the forum', merit discussion has cooled notably, except for a few now and again.
There has been an increase in number of merits available to sources and ith this hopefully an increase in merit distribution

And there is still the occasional FUD associated with bitcoin as the price is still at a low value.
I regularly catch up with the [urlhttps://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.448820]Wall Observer Thread[/url] for speculations and analysis.