1. I saw already on a couple of occasions a fresh account receiving merit for a normal post, no super valuable post to the topic really nothing special at all. Is that just a coincidence?
This may be abuse of the new system. Such people are being caught and given negative trust. This will make their account useless if they made it for signature campaigns.
2. The bounty and signature campaigns will keep the root problems. The Dear Sir guys with a high rank keep the rank and are still posting their rubbish all over the place. Campaign managers are often super arrogant providing no details or information whatsoever.
You can report such posts and the moderators will take care of that. Just because someone is doing a wrong things and still successful, it does not mean all of us should take the same route.
I understand your point of view, but for you it can be normal for other member it can be super helpful.
Sometimes it will be clear that post got 50 merits and it could be written by anyone but in case someone will write many posts and will receive just 1 or 2 merits then what?
It's not easy to find such abuse.
Other thing is that who and why will stop you for giving your free merits just for normal posts? (I saw already some threads where high ranked members wanted to support jr. members).