This also doesn't look at the whole picture. How many newbies are there, compared to legendaries? How many are posting 20,30 or 50 posts a week? Legendaries get more merit, since there's some pretty significant users here which happen to be legendaries.

While, I do get your point, I do think you'd need to collect additional data, as right now it looks bad, but when you factor in the amount of newbies signing up, and remaining active it's a different story. For example, a lot of the legendaries have more posts than merit per month. Therefore, that suggests you might have to be posting quite often to receive merit, not because merit sources consider that as a factor of distributing, but because there's more exposure to their posts.

Plus, the section matters. Technical discussion is always going to get more merit, as people generally learn a little more or have interesting discussions, and debates.