Merit sucks. I've been studying threads and posts and now at this point it's obvious that people don't award merit to others for good posts, they reward it because they know each other on here. Very sad system. It needs to be trashed or redone.
This is the problem right now about the merit system but it doesn't mean its not good, it just so happen that we have our own standard and we can't dictate people from giving merit if you just saw a quality post then you might either give merit or just scroll down because you can't do anything about it.
If you really want to help people from getting merit then try to post the link of their quality post here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2819141.0Don't worry, later on everyone here will adopt the new system and give merits to those who really deserve it.