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.
You are right, not all useful posts get merit
try you read the posts in every forum, there are many good postings that do not get merit, whereas the usual writing gets merit
I think merit is useless