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If one wants to keep up the pace with the time required to rank-up as it did before the Merit System, youll need to gain a rough average of one merit per day (and that's when @DireWolfM14s calculator comes in handy). That is pretty tough to achieve nowadays, but 1 Merit .. not really.
Call me "merit farmer", call me "example of survivorship bias" (I dismiss both those statement, but who cares), but I can confirm it is doable.
Without bending your own way of posting to better fit the merit system.