The problem we have currently from my knowledge is we only have one point of failure regarding the recovery of the Bitcoin domain name if theymos was to ever disappear.
What we know of. But no one except theymos knows what he did after he became the owner of the domain. If that happened on 17 April 2020, there is a possibility that on 18 April, theymos already took necessary steps in regards to what will happen if he is no longer here. Or ony day after that. Theymos had management access under Cobra, so it's possible that Cyrus now has management access under theymos.
My question is how can we better secure the domain in the event that theymos disappears (something that I am not saying will happen or is even likely too)
Of course it will happen. theymos will die one day, same as you, and the same fate awaits me. Theymos is quite responsive when it comes to things related to the forum. The best is to ask him directly to avoid all the speculation. Maybe he made his decision long time ago but he doesn't want to name his successors in public to not put a target on their back.
I was hoping he'd tell us something about how he thinks the merit system is going, but instead he just created more merit sources and upped the existing sources' sMerits.
By doing that he gave us an answer. I see it as we need more merit sources to give out more merits. Those who are doing a good job already will receive a bigger supply of sMerits to hand out. If it was the other way around and he removed a few merit sources or decreased the overall supply, that would mean that too many merits are handed out and we need to slow down.