I will share my personal experience, before I ranked up to full membership. I applied for a rank up thread where I got skipped twice even though I meet the exact requirements others who got their needed merit to rank up applied for. I had to delete both posts after I got defined upon reapplying.

Also I discovered in previous times people got merited based on effort, quality, projects or solutions. And majority got theirs through mere effort but this days effort no longer count. Effort must match with 100% accuracy.