Surely, there have been a lot of criticisms of whether the merit system has been implemented fairly and whether it is going to achieve various forum objectives including ranking up and encouraging quality participation (contributions). 

I doubt that there would be a desire for complete decentralization the forum or the merit system and you can tell by the limited number of starting merit sources, that theymos does not want a completely decentralized merit system because it seems to be aimed to solve some problems with trolls and spammers and perhaps even to lessen the importance of the trust system.