I believe the quicker way is to not allow newbies and Jr. members to create new threads, except in beginners and help, then clean up the rest of the forum from spambait topics and spam mega threads.
I'd support bringing back Newbie Jail and hiring a load more moderators as well. But that doesn't address the same problem that I was trying to. It's the thousands of higher ranked accounts making pointless repetitive posts that are above the threshold to get deleted by the mods but are only made for signature payment.
OP, your idea isn't horrible, but I do think we're way too early in the game to depend on lack of merits being responsible for someone getting censored or anything like that. You know I'd be all in favor for a goal like you mentioned, but I think this proposal has too many potential pitfalls to work--yet. Maybe in a year or so if we still have jr members with 600 activity and 23 merit...those folks might deserve to be stealth banned or some such thing.
Remember, it is in fact pretty hard to get merit points for the vast majority here. It's really going to take some time for them to rank up--especially if their English sucks and they don't avail themselves of the local boards.
You might be right about it being too early and there not being enough Merit flowing through the system yet. Remember this isn't about censoring or punishing anyone. I just want to turn having a signature into something that has to be continually earned rather than a default right. That's effectively what Merit has done for new accounts but what about the many thousands of shitposters that are already here?