Are you implying that out of 109 old merit sources, Theymos created 17 new Merit Sources, and destroyed 38 other MS?
This makes me wondering who was demoted. I had no clue about such an high number of MS being so inactive.
Well, I have a few ideas, but I don't know how to check for that number in reality.
It's possible. I see 89 users who have 0 source merit, which means they were merit sources at one point and now they aren't. I don't have the previous source list but 38 demoted sources in this update sounds about right.
Some of them didn't even login to the forum. So even though the total number of sources and allocation has decreased, we can observe a general increase in merits because now we have more active sources.