That's the intrinsic problem with Karma system in the forum. There are many different aspects of the game hence the different section of the forums. Who is to say that the trade aspect of the game is less important than the attacking or general discussion etc? There are different play styles for different players and so the importance of a particular forum can be varied from player to player. It's gonna have the unintended consequences if we remove a part of the forum from counting towards the Karma just like the concept of censoring in hope that it will make the society better. Just my opinion.
Just want to add a little info on this. Education time reduction doesn't work in a additive fashion, more like a multiplicative fashion. Eg, if you have both 20% reduction from merits and 10% from principal job, it does not reduce by 30% (20+10). The formula is more like "Education Time x 0.8(merits) x 0.9(Job)". So theoretically it is never possible to reduce education time to 100% reduction even if the developer add insane amount of specials which reduce the education time.
Your stats won't matter if you both trained balanced and the all other factors like merits upgrades,etc are equal. That's why I say I can't really explain or comment on the outcome. I doubt nobody would be able to explain your situation except may be the Admins. But without the attacks logs we, the other players can't even hypothesize properly what is happening here. Excuse my previous comment if you are looking answer from an admin or staff. Cheers
Not possible to comment without the attack logs, stats distributions, and merit upgrades. My guess would be the disparity between the strength vs defense and speed vs dexterity between you two or something along those lines.