There are only 94 people with more merit than I have. There are hundreds of thousands of people who use the forum every month, most probably wont participate continuously for 16 months, but I would expect for at least thousands to have enough activity to be a hero.
It just unfortunately shows how big the number of people here are solely for bounties(most probably more of altcoin bounties) and aren't even to spend a bit of time learning about bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general. It honestly doesn't even take to be an intermediate/expert to earn a few merits from time to time, but people are complaining on how to earn them. The problem is obviously more on them, rather than being the fault of the current merit system.