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.
Merit Sources shouldn't need to do merit hoarding, because when they make a Vision and Mission when applying to become a Merit Source, they often attach a history of their achievement statistics. Speaking of the first batch of Merit Source assignments, there are still many things that need to be addressed, maybe they are stingy because they have difficulty finding worthy users in their post history reviews to be appreciated or have other activities outside the forum that cannot be abandoned, in the end, many monthly sMerit allocations are piled up.
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...
To reduce cases of merit hoarding on Merit Sources, Theymos should choose Merit Sources that really have high Loyalty on the forum. So far, I have found several Merit Sources (no need to mention their names here) that do their job well, some of them need to be rotated with other users or provide opportunities for non-merit source members.
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.
Obviously there will be BIG PROBLEMS if the Merit Source chosen by the Administrator is more stingy than the non-merit source members.
In the context of your quote above, I really understand the intent and purpose, those who hoard services are only a small number of PELIT users who cannot appreciate contributions from other users.
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.
As I explained above, there are still many shortcomings in the FIRST PRODUCT. So far what I have seen in the field, Merit Source is already on track, both globally and on the Local Board.
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 (as Philip mentioned the very issue that he has had with building up of smerits and some dilemmas regarding how to spend them in a way that is comfortable for the merit source member as well as other real life issues that s/he may well have happening)..
We never know if haven't tried it, the opportunity needs to be given to non-merit source users who are very active in distributing sMerit to other forum members. I also found some Merit Source Applications that have not been accepted, I thought Theymos should give it a try as some local councils also need Merit Source.
Changes need to be made on a rotating basis to reduce potential problems, Theymos should be more active in overseeing stingy Merit Sources and immediately rotate with new Source. I think if done like this, Merit Source will be even more active in distributing monthly sMerit allocations to deserving users (please correct if I'm wrong).