Reaching to any rank you wish of depends on how information you passed and research you carried out using statistics as illustrations. Bitcointalk then (2017) and now is not the same. Then you can ranked up without merit but now requires merit for you to be ranked up. Albeit your post has be lovely since from day one you registered as member on bitcointalk
It's definitely harder to rank up these days, and certain posts are more likely to get merit. For example, the statistics users are chucking out via data scraping, and all that will be more likely to receive merit, because its both informative, and out of the capability of many of the users here. There's been 3 stages of ranking up if I remember correctly here on Bitcointalk. First of all, ranking up was tied to amount of posts you had (activity wasn't implemented at this time) then activity got introduced, and there were a few moans, and groans about it. Finally, the merit system was implemented, and has had the most criticism, and impact on the forum. I personally believe its had a positive impact on the forum, and is the better system of all three.