I am not advocating an increase in merit source members because that compounds the two-tier issue. At the merit system currently stands, it is a two-tier system consisting of a group that are merit source and another group that are not. With all of the perceived benefits some might member conclude that merit source have brought to the forum, it excludes factors that are hardly mentioned: corruption and manipulation.
The word worthy is subjective without doubt nevertheless, the deliberate avoiding of giving merits to a
worthy post purely based on the fact the author is disliked, is an inappropriate use of the system. As is the over meriting of a post on the basis of having somewhat of a rapport with the author. The latter is commonly glossed over by merit source citing a quote from theymos that stated it was better to use the allocated per month merits rather than not within the stipulated month. That has given a free hand to some merit source to justify their merit giving.
All of this is happening in an environment where merit sources can act with complete impunity and without having to justify their actions if (some or most) of their merit history is examined and questions raised. That is part of the reason why a two-tier system is not conducive to community cohesion.
What I am advocating is an overhaul of the merit system. How exactly that overhaul would manifest itself after a transformation is something I would invite members to suggest if they believe it is the way forward.
For sure, the merit system is not without tradeoffs, but you might need to be more specific in what you are suggesting, since it surely would be nice if theymos would increase the number or merit sources rather than reduce them, as seemed to have had happened in his last somewhat global changes. He went from something like 130 merit sources down to 88.. so he seems to be working in the opposite direction of your suggestion.
Another thing is that overseeing the merit system is likely a lot of work that theymos does not really want to do, which seems to be more apparent from his actions rather than anything specific that he has said in recent times on the topic.
Perhaps he needs a merit czar, but the person would need to be someone he trusts to follow the spirit of what he wants, which seems to be mostly a hands off kind of a system (maybe a person who is already on the staff that he has already screened for the characteristics that he considers good for a person carrying out such oversight duties - to the extent that he has not already created such position without saying anything since it might not need to be publicly known who such person is - even though there is value in some level of openness too in regards to some kinds of things, even though I doubt it is known exactly how some of the administrative matters are decided).
In any case, I am having trouble getting away from your observation of a two-tiered system that is currently existing.. yet maybe there could be a way to expand the merit source members and to cut back on the quantity of smerit sources per member.. so maybe no member has more than 210 smerits per 30 days, for example (that would be on average of 7 per day - those seem like reasonable top end numbers).. but then there might be members with various lower levels of smerits in their monthly source.. maybe starting out at 15 per 30 days)... but if there were too many merit source members, such as more than 2,100 (work up from 88 to 210 and maybe see how that goes before trying to add another 100 or 200 and then see how that goes - so yeah my random number of 2,100 might be too many), then that would likely lead to abuse of too many smerits, and take us back to pre-merit spamming days... which would keep the merit czar overly busy in the kinds of work that theymos would likely prefer to avoid drama and work and perhaps avoid too much change.
I would not claim to have enough information to know any kind of possibly balanced solution that would be clearly better than the sttus qo, even though my sense is that it is difficult to get completely out of two tiered, even if there could be some attempts at leveling out the matter, but that tends to take work. and maybe theymos has to learn to trust some one with such oversight duties... There's gotta be someone who is somewhat compatible with his views on the topic, yet at the same time capable of helping in the oversight of such merit system matter (while being more help than hinderance)..
I get the sense that theymos is viewing the matter more closely to a kind of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" kind of a view, even though surely there are some members who are somewhat reasonably discontented by the current way merit systems are... and yeah, I agree overall witht he idea that the number is too high. I doubt that a two-tiered elimination and/or meaningul reduction is going to be possible, even though there probably could be some possible ways to expand the merit source members to a level that might be a goal of reaching a few hundred rather than the current less than 100 count.