The good: Only the quality posters will rank up.
Farming acounts aside, that is what it should be.
Quality does have different meanings depending on user perspective though. For some it's technical, for others funny, some see it as informational, other as a throrough splilling of opinion, and so on.
The bad: Even if you post quality contents you may not get many merits by the people.
That is true. It depends also on when you post, where you post, the length of the thread, the language, etc. It's correlated also to where meriters are likely to be reading and what amount they have. Some local boards are scarce of merit givers and of the total amount they hold.
The ugly: When you post great content many people are lazy to click and go to the next page and add the merit(s).
I don´t see this being a general thing. What is true is that many people have low amounts of sMerit to give away and therefore, psychologically, take longer to give it away being it a scarce resouce.
Maybe sMerit should expire after a certain time as for example happens with loyalty points (or get transfered to a merit source so as not to lessen the circulating total amount).
It would be nice to have some global stats on number of users per rank that have managed to rank-up, broken down by the amount of time required, number of posts, sections involved, language, etc.