You are missing a important point. Due to massive abusements in the forum recently by spammers, cheaters, fudders, higher-ranked members are likely difficult to find good or high-quality posts. Those good threads are covered by tons of other shit posts, then hard to see. This factor contribute to low down the probability of getting merit points for good posts.

And much more important, you should not pay attention to get merits fastly. I will not help you generally. Instead, you should focus on improving yourself and writing as good quality as possible to increase your post quality first. Then some of your good quality posts will get merits. You will be ranked up for sure if doing as I recommend.

Good luck, merits will follow you till the day you leave the forum, lol.