Not really. My naberhood in en05 has 48 people. I attack all my nabers every or almost every day and I keep falling behind in total attacks in charts. Players I used to have an equal number of attacks with are now ahead of me by nearly 200 attacks. So yeah I got tad of a disadvatage there, just gotta hope for a better merge finally coming or their sizes dropping too(I msged them, they said they have about 65'ish naberhoods).
This had happened to me too, along with Wallachian. The problem must lie in the fact that there are no neighborhoods within the described parameters small enough to be combined. Let me put it this way- the neighborhood where the guys in the top ten are have an average score which exceeds those of other neighborhoods by more than 20%. The neighborhoods which are fairly new, are going to have scores less than 20% than yours.
These incompatible neighborhoods are not so good, since they would make it too hard for the newer players to keep any goods from being plundered. So in these cases the neighborhoods are not eligible for merging.
By the way, every neighborhood that has existed for a long period of time is the product of several merges, not just the one. So it is not like we are waiting around for a single merge to solve our pvp woes. Don't you get tired of attacking those two spearmen? But since the neighborhoods are refreshed from time to time, the competition gets heavier and heavier. From my original neighborhood of 80, I see max one person there. So the neighborhood I am in now is probably the combination of 7, 8, even 16 neighborhoods. So I could imagine that if your neighborhood has 48, then there are also a bunch of other neighborhoods which had combined to make numbers 40+, which will not be combined according to the rules. I had been in a neighborhood of less than 40 for a while, now it is up to 77.
So the thing is that the neighborhoods change over the weeks. Once the game winds to where there are people finishing up LMA, you will probably have only the serious people there, the ones who really stick with it, with huge armies.