The merit system is not working, look the merit points of people on the forum, it does not move (even for the more relevant posts), the forum established a system which was suppose to penalize newcomers flooding the forum with useless post, but the forum penalize itself, good luck everybody, If you think people will give you merit points for free you are mistaken.
It is too early to tell if the merit system has failed. But in my point of view, this merit system has improved the kind of post that we are seeing now but not all though. The main purpose of this, is to eliminate post that are not helpful to the forum. I try not to use low quality post because we have no criteria how to distinguish one.