I can understand your frustration, your activity has already reached the member level, but you miss the merits to rank up. You need to collect 8 merits to be able to rank up. This is not as bad as you see now.
If you check a few Hero members, who were 1-2 activity periods away from becoming Legendary, they have to recevie 500 (!!!) merits to be able to rank up. Also, on lower level, they also have a huge number of merits to receive before they can rank up (Senior to become Hero: 250, Full member to become Senior 150 merits, etc...)
You only have to receive 8 more merits and you can rank up, this is not so bad, comparing to the above stated ranks.
Also, the system has just changed, so you cannot decide if it works well and as expected or not in a short time like this. I know that you are not happy with these kind of answers, but what I would do to recevie my 500 merits is the following: I'm hardening my efforts to post quality content and sometime somewhere merits will start to come. You cannot expect that every post you make will receive merits, especially now, when people are not really aware about the change and they have to adapt themselves to this change but time will tell which effort of you was the key in receiving the merits on the long run. Also, you just have agreed someone who was complaining about this new merit system and you have received a merit. This can be a luck, but you cannot build your rank up process on posts like this, so it's better to start posting quality and waiting for merits (and there's nothing else you can really do).