I will kind of go along with your point that the merit system might not be the most fair system, but I doubt that creating additional requirements for merit sources would be very helpful.  There seems to be a decent amount of subjectivity and even lack of imposition of requirements for merit sources which likely causes it to be kind of less centralized... even though sure, having the same merit sources for a long time, likely gravitates towards greater centralization, so what would be the solution to make it more fair?  Have more merit sources or rotating merit sources, which is something that theymos could do.. perhaps?

Sure there could be more clear guidelines for merit sources too, including that they spend their merits or lose their position or lose their allocation, and if there seems to be needs for tweaking and ongoing monitoring and tweaking of the system in order to attempt to make it more fair, then maybe theymos should appoint a merit system czar?  Not sure if that would help, or if theymos's seeming choice to NOT change the system very often is more fair from his perspective, which seems that NOT making changes very often seems to be where he is at, at this time.