Half the time I don't even pay attention to the username I am meriting, let alone if they are a merit hoarder, inactive, banned, and so on. I've even merited a user that I have then reported a few minutes later because it turned out to be plagiarism.
8 smerits if distribute well will result in 8 - 4 - 2 - 1 - 0.5 = 15.5 smeris in total and only 15 smerit can be distributed.
The bottom line was that from 8 merites you can get 7 more, so I was not mistaken about anything, maybe the translation is not entirely clear.
Being completely pedantic, but actually you are both wrong. Given that sending any amount of merit results in exactly one half of that merit becoming available to the recipient as sendable merit, it is in essence an infinite series which converges on 1. Therefore, 8 merits when fully distributed (approaching infinity) result in 8 sMerits.