Wooow that was some huge number of removed merit sources. I think their inactivity explains why there was a very low supply of Merits in the past few months.
It also beats my understanding why someone who go through the trouble of applying to be a merit source, yet they very well know that they are not going to be active in the forum. It would be understandable if it was a handful of chaps but 40 inactive merit sources is a huge number.
Hopeful the double allocations to active merit sources will try to solve the problem
Most of those merit sources were probably assigned the role at the start of the merit system. Not everyone had to apply to become a merit source. I'm not sure what the criteria was to become a merit source at the beginning, but it seems to me that theymos wants to keep around 20,000 merit each month in circulation, and will not add anymore merit sources until there are inactive users. That's just based on my observations the last few times merit sources have been added, and removed.