I was thinking very similar recently, based on how many users had previously earnt 10 and 250 merits compared to how many have now. I was trying to find data/charts on how many users had earnt this amount when DT1 eligibility had changed, in order to propose what it should be now, so that DT1 eligibility to remain at the same "difficulty" level. I'd guess there are as many users who have now earnt 100 as 10 back then, and 500 for those who earnt 250, but that's just a guess. It'd be interesting to see how many users would remain eligible if the requirements for DT1 were increased from 10/250 to 100/500 for example. I don't think it would remove that many users, but simply return the number of eligible DT1 members back to how many there were originally - at least that's the idea and theory for increasing the difficulty.

If anyone can point me towards data earnt user-merit data from DT1 changes it'd be appreciated. While I agree with other proposals such as DT2 requires +2 strength, I think fundamentally DT1 eligibility becoming easier and easier as time goes on (with more merit distributed) will forever be a worsening issue until it's resolved. The eligibility difficulty should be maintained in my opinion, not lowered over time.