While I agree with you, I also think default merit should be given in a better way...proportionally to days/posts maybe....
this way someone who just got Full member status and me, few days before reaching Senior member, got same starting merit points, so I'm actually slowed down lot more
I do not think the default merit should have been given in a different way. I'm not saying it's perfect, but "days/posts" would not have been a better way of doing things. It is unfortunate for the people that were about to rank up and
deserve to be ranked up, but I'm going to be honest with you; most of the people complaining about this exact scenario are people who do not deserve to be ranked up and may never rank up with the current system. This tells me that merit is working exactly as it is intended to.
If you truly are deserving of that rank, you should earn the merit in no time, plus what's the rush? Ranks do not mean much, and won't mean much until the merit system has a chance to settle in and the older high-ranking accounts that don't belong are weeded out.
My main point, slowing you down has done no harm to your forum experience, but it has improved the overall health of the forum by stopping spammers in their tracks (in terms of ranking up).