I don't disagree with you, but in the whole scheme of things, there are not very many merit hoarders.. so in that sense, it probably does not matter that much if you send merits to ONLY the hoarders because there are plenty of folks who still give out smerits.
True, so far I have found that there are so many merit sources or merit contributors who have the LOYALTY to issue sMerit to users who deserve it. Merit hoarders are only done by people who are stingy or can't appreciate the education of other users, but this case is very rare.
Merit sources that are chosen are really the right people and contribute a lot to the forum, they will always check the posts that are worth throwing sMerit. So I'm not too worried about sMerit hoarding users, because the forum still has contributors who can appreciate constructive, informative, and quality posts.
As many of us know, there is no rule against merit hoarding... but theymos said that he would keep an eye on the potential that it could become an issue.
And, merit hoarding for regular members is surely less of an issue than for merit sources, and I am pretty sure that in the first round of merit source member assignments, some of those members who were assigned as merit sources, were really stingy regarding their sending out merits, and some of them even publicly stated such.
Theymos would not even need to have had to see their posts in which they made such anti-smerit sending philosophies to be able to see whether or not they were using their smerit monthly allocations... so it did take theymos a year or maybe even two years before he really did end up reducing the smerit allocations of those merit sources and/or removing them from being merit sources...
So I do believe that it would be a BIGGER problem if merit source members were merit hoarders as compared with non-merit source members.. and the context of my above quote was attempting to focus on the dynamic of regular members acting like smerit hoarders rather than merit source members.
Otherwise I agree with your overall assessment Razmirraz that it appears that current merit source members are way more inclined to liberally send smerits as compared to either the first batch of merit source members and perhaps even the second batch.. so it may well have taken a bit more than a couple of years to get each of the incremental improvements in achieving more liberal sending of smerits from merit source members.
I surely don't feel like I have enough information to know whether some improvement could be made in terms of either rotating merit source members a bit more or if there might be some improvements if theymos might increase the number of merit source members.. because there does seem to be a bit of work in making those kinds of assessments, and surely sometimes there are likely some issues with how some of the merit source members (and not even excluding myself from the potential problem areas) are sending smerits and/or unfairly benefiting from their being assigned as a merit source member... .but likely theymos does also recognize that even if some of us might be sloppy and neglectful and maybe even deliberately bad from time to time in how we are either sending smerits or refraining from sending smerits, he likely also recognizes and appreciates that there is quite a bit of work that may well go into merit source members figuring out their own approach to the matter and then actually employing it on a daily/weekly and even monthly basis..
For example, there might be some reports that theymos and/or various admins/mods receive - and some of those reports might end up leading to something in which immediate action might need to be taken by theymos.. but then other times, it may well be that he is just making notes and accumulating a file.. to "get to" later, whether it is 1 year later, 2 years later or maybe some longer period of time so long as the accumulated notes are not really causing him a sufficient amount of discomfort in regards to just letting the whole matter just continue to run "as is" until a certain threshold of discomfort is crossed... like the breaking bellow the 200-week moving average as BTC's price support.. and when it happens.. he says to himself "oh shit, I better do something"..... I.e... buy more BTC.. or globally tweak the forum's smerit system..