It's all about you more like. Why do you care about merit and ranks unless you're only here to earn as much as possible from signature campaigns? People can post here freely regardless of their rank and merit but those who actually want to contribute something worthwhile will get the merit pretty quickly. Most people just don't seem willing to contribute anything of value other than the standard generic one liners they can churn out as fast as possible in spam megathreads and those are exactly the sort of people the merit system is meant to restrict.