The admins of this forum have all the right to change the rules in this forum. They also have all the right to assign anyone they want to be moderators and staff. The admins use their best judgement on all their moves in this forum and they do that for the advancement of this forum. If you have any suggestion send it to them and let them have a look and study. But for now lets embrace this merit system and see how it goes. This is just new, not even a month implemented for us to judge that its not good. Its either you are part of the solution or you are part of the problem.
I think the sentiment here is that people are disappointed at the management capability of the admins, including their way of communicating the inevitable pain in such process. For sure this is a private forum and admin can do whatever they want.
They started building this community from 2010 and they have every right to destroy it. The truth is that people can vote with their feet and if the system is bad enough, another forum will replace bitcointalk.org.
Then merit or level on BTT won't mean anything.
Governments tries to ban bitcoin but they can't, even those are their (sort of) private countries and the rulers can do whatever they want. Deploying a new Trumpester system to see how it goes, being completely ignorant and insensitive of how most people feels, while every single hero/legendary members in this thread has some signature campaigns going on, is irresponsible, incompetent, and is a bad sign for the forum.
Everything has its time in history. Even bitcoin might eventually die to give place for maybe a better designed value system. Now could be the ending of the beginning or BTT, but it could also be the beginning of its ending.
Way back 2010 this forum doesn't have this Merit system because everything is still running smooth, but eventually things get out of hand as there's a lot users who wants to register in this forum and they want a lot of account to control so they can join campaigns and because of that quality of posts suffered because most of them are just posting just to meet the dead line and not because they want to join a healthy discussion or share their knowledge about the topic. Way back 2010, I guess its not even an issue, but now it is. And the answer of BCT is you don't rank up if post quality is not good based on the merits awarded to the user who posted. We don't want the admins of BCT to just say, lets re-start all over again, new forum and implement the merit system. Lets give the merit system a try.