Of course, merit system can not reduce spammers to show their shits through their shitty threads. The reason is (as you said) they can still join signature campaign with Junior member rank, for most campaigns which accept the rank, payments for this rank is usually half of payments of Member rank. So, for shit-posters, they don't care about contribution to the forum, no need to rank up to Member rank; because they can earn the same amount of money by using 2 Junior Member accounts and delivering their shits.
Personally, launching stricter rules which prohibit Junior members join signature campaigns forever will the solution to eliminate entirely shit-posters, then wipe out spamming threads.
No need to quote many posts...
Disabling signatures could be done to shut down shitposting but it will have also a huge impact on the forums future.
They will be tagged then banned soon. Don't worry about them. If you find them, you can report them to moderators. Show your evidence up.
For the Merit, it could delay ranking for regular users but it will collapse farming accounts; they can cheat, trade merit but this will end soon once they run out of smerit.
Agree! They have their rights to do this! Nevertheless, they should use their sMerits better.
For satoshi he created Bitcoin and he "disappeared", he doesn't even own his account. I respect the opinion of people sending smerit for the founder account but for me it is a waste of it since it could benefit others to rank up...