If we see the activity here, carefully,  a lot of members are involved in merit abuse at small scale as well. I was checking recently merited posts and came across one such case.

Profiles involved:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1100353
His merit summary : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;u=1100353

He gave and receive merits from the profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1100122

Both the profile are registered on August 08, 2017

Other profile that may be involved

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1501634
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1501624

Both these registered on December 23, 2017

Many profiles may be involved. I am sure that if I give just one hour on this, I can point out at least 100 such more profiles.

Yes, we are  missing an important point related to merit abuse. It is good that genuine members are giving their time to find out remembers abusing the merit system and then reporting it but what about:

1) The merits which got wasted in the whole process. Is there anything being done to compensate for those merit points ? I am sure that the admin must have thought about creating a system in accordance with the number of merits required to be in circulation. Did he consider these abuses cases while panning that ?

2) Why not have some restriction related to the maximum number of merits allowed per post ?