What about the merits source, which ignores B&H and Altcoin discussion boards? This is one of the issues, isn't it? Too well aware that those are the only boards with a higher proportion of newbies.
I think part of the problem is that these boards which tend to be the most visited by newbies are so full of shitposts and spam that it becomes cumbersome to find decent posts worth meriting. I'm not a merit source, but I spend my sMerits like a drunken sailor, and I do actively try to give merits to users who need them. I keep the B&H board on my watchlist, but again it is infrequent that I find a newbie posts worth meriting.
There are sections of the forum that I've noticed newbies getting a significant amount of merit. In the technical related boards it appears we have a few merit sources and many higher rank member who earn a significant amount do share their sMerits with newbies on a regular basis.
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.
Welsh makes a really good point here. Rather than just counting the distribution of merits to Legendries vs. Newbies, a better metric might be to graph the number merits per post within the two subsets of members. LoyceV also made a good point; newbies who earn merit don't stay newbies for long. That might make it hard to really get a good picture of the situation.