Nobody is getting salty, lmao. It's about the ratio, and the effort it takes to get where you are. To get 1000 free merit points by being an old user takes way less effort than actually grinding to get the 1000 merit points. It is a vast improvement to the previous system; it's just that in my view the distribution of merit points has been unfair/biased. Remember, it's just an opinion - I'm sure Legendary members than received a bunch of free merit will vehemently oppose my point, and all the Newbies will agree with me.
Yes but it takes 2+ years to get to legendary rank, without the need to write quality posts or anything, just a couple of posts in two weeks period and you'll be sure to get activity points and therefore rank up.. but with merit points, even tho you're a newbie, if you have quality posts and contribute to the forum, you'll be getting merit points and you can get to sr. member or even higher in quite less time than 2 years, with far less number of posts and time, you can get to the rank that takes more than a year... So, kind of, this is better for new people as well.EDIT: sorry about this, I completely forgot about the activity still playing a part in ranking up. When merit was implemented, I've understood that those two are separated in ranking up. @iluvbitcoins my bad.