I would like to choose both happy and sad.
1. Happy because merit system has motivated users to be more energetic, more constructive, in particular newcomers have tried composing higher quality posts, helping others. On the other hand, higher ranked users found them useful in terms of giving newcomers hints, links, documents to learn, advices to improve their knowledge, skills, etc. It is two-way interaction between them.
2. Sad mainly because merit abusements seem to be occured and discovered day by day, including merit trading, merit exchanging, etc. We can easily found low-quality or even one-line posts which received 20, 30, or 50 merits from one specific sender. It destroys the original objectives of merit system.
To conclude, I highly appreciate what Theymos have done to launch merit system and strongly believe in the system that it will help to clean up and build up the forum as better place for Bitcoin/Altcoins discussions.
Newcomers will definitely rank up if they spend more time to read, to learn, to share, to help each other. The more time they spend for each post, the higher (in most cases) quality post will get; which in turn increase writers' internal quality day by day. For long-term improvement like this, those ones will have more chances to earn merits from other users. Most importantly, don't be here simply for getting merits, for ranking up, and getting free money fastly; instead be here for those purposes mentioned above. Of course, newcomers can join campaigns and get rewards as bonuses, not as their main purpose to be here.
Good luck and rank up with continuous, high qualities, constructive threads.