The merit system itself is highly controversial.
Nothing in the world is controversial by itself, but people make controversies about the things that bother them I guess. That is what happened with Merit System here.
It is dividing this forum into different groups.
That's true. Shitposters and quality posters are separated by the system. People without any Merits are obviously not contributors and that is how it has divided the forum IMO.
The main problem with the whole premise is that in this forum we have a financial incentive to NOT give Merit to new users and rather sell Merit or exchange it with other accounts.
That is not a valid point at all. An ordinary user cannot generate Merits, and thus they will run out of sMerits if they sell or trade them. And then they will be out of business eventually.
And, people give Merits only to quality posts regardless the rank of the posters.
Furthermore the whole system creates a massive gatekeeper problem. Why should only high-ranking users decide who gets points?
Who in the world said that only the high-ranked users decide who gets points? Any user having any rank is the owner of its decisions as long as he/she carries sMerits. If you have Merits, it is you who decides where to give them away.
There are so many alternative systems better equipped to deal with this problem. One alternative could be giving accounts older than 3 months (or 6 months) one Merit to give away each day.
What will be the use of it then if an account older than 3 or 6 months starts getting Merits everyday and ranks up eventually after reaching the point required. That is how the forum was working before with Activity system and that is why Merit system has been implemented so that no one ranks up automatically, without making any efforts.
This forum is growing every day and very often people who answer "newbie" questions are doing as much good work as someone who explains a highly technical question. It's just helping on a different level.
I don't think it depends on the type of answer or question, but it is more about the quality of what you are writing. Someone writing shit on a technical discussion would get the same response which someone writing non-constructive posts in beginners section get. If you make efforts on answering a question no matter on what topic it is based, you will surely get rewarded for it, if it is spotted. And making no efforts in posting even in technical threads would earn you nothing.