2 - Many of those who you cited seem to make fairly good posts, but they all seem to have fairly low amounts of merit. This could be an indication that some of the local threads that are not large enough for detected subs are lacking source merit.
Yeah true. We have very few people who shares merit in our local, the reason is they don't have smerit to share. Foe example, I have zero smerit at the moment.
[/quote]Having sufficient source merit in local communities should be important. Without sufficient source merit, members will not rank up, which may lead people to not being as engaged, and not as active in their bitcointalk communities.