You're not complaining cause you are a Senior Member, and you take advantage of your position by participating in signature campaigns. You don't need any more merit, you have a high rank already. On the hand I understand OP statements, I am a rookie too and a non native speaker, just like OP seems to me (pardon if I'm wrong). And I strive to receive merit, but i'm not complaining, I just will wait and do my best as always. My posts are probably not interesting enough, I accept it.
As of the system proposed by OP... I don't think it's actually possible, admins have a life too, and I don't think they earn a paycheck for their role of tutorship they perfectly do already. This would be too much to handle, imagine looking for quality comments in a post with 50 or more comments?
I don't know what can be done to improve the system, if I'll come up with something I'll be glad to share my opinion in a more useful way.
You like reading my mind, have exactly the same opinion about this whole topic. Nothing we can do, only do our best to improve the system, put more effort in writing quality posts and read others. So many of us just see the interesting topic and hurry on replying without bothering to read anything except the topic starter's post and maybe one or two below it. So many good posts could be lost between, which deserve to be recognized.