True, but he's smarter than average IMO.  Very good with math & data analysis, and it shows--much like when nullius was around and used to write masterpieces just for his typical posts.  It's true that starting from scratch and earning tons of merits is possible, but it just isn't going to happen for the average newbie. 

I'd like to see just this graph, because we look to be so correlated it's ridiculous.  I don't think either of us had that initial jump in merits, either.  It's interesting to see how that happened, because you can clearly see how crazy the early days of the merit system were and how quickly everyone's sMerits ran out (merit sources excluded).  People were handing out insane amounts of merit in the first few days and probably didn't realize how important they'd become.

Thanks for the graphs, LoyceV.