You are right! Unfortunately, quick responsive spammers realized the fact, then they adapted, switched their favorite places (boards) from altcoins (bounties, ann, discussions) to Meta board.
That's terrible to see hundreds of shitty threads from them (and of course dozens of shitty topics) in Meta board after the launch of merit system
I think your difficulty highlights one of the current problems with the merit system, and Theymos has posted that he is aware of it, and is acting to rectify the situation. You post on the legal and economics boards, and those are useful and valuable assets to Bitcoin Talk in my opinion.
That's good if you have good original intention to contribute to forum this way. I believe that on all boards / child boards in the forum, we can definitely can see valuable, helpful threads; but they are extremely hard to find intentionally mainly because they are covered by tons of shits. We can only see them by chance.
Unfortunately they are not frequented by the merit awarders, and one of the reasons that Talk Merit was created was to allow Jet Cash the time to spend on both of those boards, and hopefully he can award merits where they are deserved.