I, princepawn, merlyn, and everyone else started with
zero XP- even though merlyn wrote a book about Perl
Not to nitpick an excellent discussion, but your example
is actually not a good one - merlyn began with 1,000,000
XP. However, he thereafter requested the 1,000,000 be
removed, and earned the rest of his points (excluding the
voting bonuses while an instant saint) the hard way -
namely, by providing good answers to questions and getting
voted up for it.
Vroom still has his million XP bonus, but I'm
catching up:
only 997,328 more points to go! :)