Not bad. I think the merit system should adjust and do the following two things:
1. Limiting the maximum merits which each post can receive from one user.
2. Limiting the maximum merits which each user can send to another per day.
Those two will help us to control spammers, cheaters a little bit better. They can buy/ sell/ exchange hundreds of merits daily to only one user.
In addition, I think the system should be adjusted to give users, paricularly lower-rank users, such as Junior Members like me,
a period-gifted merits. The number of automatically allocated merits should be discussed more.
For example, 1 merit per month. It's not much, but it will give new users motivation to join the forum.
For newbies, new users, I guess it is a little bit hard for them to write such as meaningful, constructive, high-qualitied posts, right?
They should have another chance. It's simply my opinion.
The limitations on maximum merits donated per user per day sound good, and should be taken into consideration too.