For example, in the entire thread discussing Merit right now, it's 50+ pages. It's hard to go through the whole thing. I'd like to see the Merited posts, because it is a filtering mechanism. This should help the forum moderators filter through suggestions as well.
Indeed! It's impossible to have a proper discussion or to learn much more than what OP says there. I've posted 2 suggestions there but it seems to be in the oblivion now (one of those does have merits).
And to take it one step further, the new or existing posts on that thread that are being ignored are less likely to get merit, no matter how great they are.
And that would be the bad side of OP's suggestion. If a lot of people uses this proposed feature, it would be extremely difficult to see good new posts. But I'd guess not everyone would use it and a single merit+ would be enough to increase the post's visibility.
Another think I'd like to see is following someone's merits. I mean, if you think someone has a good criteria to grant merits (good or at least similar as yours), then you can follow them and then having a link showing the posts merited by those users.