You nailed it, but no one cares if they hoard the merit until there is a rule/sanction that makes them care. They will continue even if they know there are no benefits in doing that, people's behaviour is random and could be so ugly at times. This is obvious on the forum where some users who have been blessed with enough merits will find it difficult to reciprocate it on others. This is worse to the extent that their 120 days sent merits page will be 0 despite receiving 100s of merits in months.

Such people are the real hoarders. Are they not reading any posts? If possible, such like them should be penalised one way or another to force them to at least share merits as it's also important to the forum to make the good and deserving users feel appreciated and known. Besides, I always appreciate those merit sources who dedicated their time to creating threads to view the unmerited posts that deserved it. But more is needed to make it effective even as some of those links above are no more effective.