This is actually really interesting. While I do believe that there are some valuable posts in the altcoin section and by some altcoin bounty hunters, I think it is rather obvious that a lot of spam happens in the section and I do not believe it is as strictly moderated than the rest of the forum especially with all the coin pumping going on in there. This is mostly the main reason I try to stay away from it.
This does, however, bring up a very interesting question: how is merit distributed across different sections of the forum? It would be interesting to know which sections tend to produce the most quality content in the forums. This would probably be very hard to do considering that you are getting rate limited yourself with just 500 users in the sample size in a single section of the forum, but there might be an alternative way such as scraping the last x number of posts from the section and adding up the merit from there. However, with the number of sections in the forum I can see this being extremely slow. I do not have much experience with Sheets/Excel when it comes to scraping, but I might eventually write a quick script to do it and post the results myself.