You mean alot less spam? Anyway, about the merit... I think there should be some tweaks done to the current system. I believe that right now the problem is that most of the users aren't getting merit with they're posts(even if the posts are good)... Maybe because other users are still not used to this new feature, maybe because they expect a half of a page post to be eligible to win merit... All i know is that getting higher rank will be much harder than before, even if your posts are good
Totaly agree with you. Even if you post quality posts every single day it doesn't guarantee that anyone will give you merit and thus it'll take twice more time to reach the next rank. And regarding spammers, I don't think that these system will decrease the amount of spam on the forum. They'll continue to post low quality posts just to promote their threads and I think that they don't really care about their rank.