Sad to say but there are 1498183 members on this forum. Do you think they can manage it all? Administrators and staff are few but they are doing there best. Yes, there's a problem with this merit system but majority of the merit system helps the forum or the newbies to become a good posters. Like me I'm just new to this forum, I agree that ranking up isn't not easy like before the update of this forum because every rank requires many merits to rank up.
It would have been possible to handle 1498183 members if we knew that they are going to be fixed. Problem is a lot of members are joining here everyday and that number is increasing every month. If you go through the forum stats, there had been exponential rise in that number. To handle so many members, most of the forums do not have manual inspection. But here the admin has come with the solution as merit system. Best thing about merit system is that most of the posts are kind of checked or evaluated by other members thus reducing the work of senior members.