So.you guys really wanted 99% of the fishes in this forum would learn how to climb a tree?
There are two types of posters in this forum and I don't waste my time to explain what are those.
The
Monkeys and the
Fishes. And you know who you are

Your username suits you.
Agree. Merit system has shown greater impacts on lower-ranked users because they have to stop spamming with one-word, one-line posts or even long plagiarised/ shitty posts in order to catch merit points. They have to improve their posts quality somehow. Overtime, they will form new good habit, which allow them to write high or at least good quality posts naturally.
Ability to naturally write good quality, constructive threads is important, which help to build up the forum.
medium to high rank users are more affected in the current system if the basis would be the initial number of merits one needs in order to rank up, why? Because the huge loads of merits they need to earn. Newbs and jr, can easily get 10 merits, but members need 90 and full members need 150, and so on. The only difference would be newbs and jr nowadays only seeks money in this forum thus, increasing the difficulty of making a helpful post.