[ I remain skeptical.
Fair enough.

It's nice to see those improved numbers in the Croatian local. Especially the stats about the number of merits per board and the merit/post ratio. The data shows that every second post is getting merited, which is pleasant.
Merit wise, we are finally where we wanted to be and for the first time those that are mostly active in our board can't complain that it's hard to rank up.
But I am wondering when we (the Croatian local) will get a decent new newbie who will start his journey on Bitcointalk and decide to stick around...
Yep, that's the biggest issue we have at the moment. It's not a comfort, but I guess that similar situation is in the other local boards and forum in general so we are not an exception here. I tried to bring some people to bitcointalk, to no avail. And if recent Bitcoin rally to 60k+ didn't bring more people to bitcointalk, I don't now what will.
So the conclusion is if users focus on getting merit in local board then I'm sure they will take a little longer to rank up because the number of scattered merit is still less than 300 per month and most senders don't have the habit of sending more than 1 merit per tx.
That bolded part reminded me of something I wanted to add some time ago, and that is merit per transaction chart. Iirc I gave up because some low activity boards had numbers completely screwed up (e.g one transaction of 20 merits) that would mess up the chart. Anyway, I made it now and maybe I'll add it to my monthly overview.