THIS IS JUST SO TRUE.
Higher ranking users kept saying we should shut up and stop ranting about the merit system but they did not experience it in the first place. Sure, having a merit system may reflect on the capability of a user to create useful posts, but how about the responsibility of those who own sMerit? Who has the eagerness to read replies in a thread and give merit? It's actually too hard and a matter of luck. No matter how you construct posts, if no one who has sMerit will recognize it, you can't get one.
Assuming this is your one-and-only account, I'd have to say that you registered at an inconvenient time.
I'd also say that you apparently don't realize why the system was put in place. It wasn't just for the hell of it. It was to keep shitposters from ranking up at-will, because that had become a glaring problem. The ones who complain about how their posts aren't earning merit are usually the ones who mistake post length for post quality, never understanding that a 200-character post in scrambled English won't ever be worthy of merit by anyone fluent in that language.
Myself, I am on
that list of all-time most generous merit-senders, but the catch is that I don't merit anyone who writes crappy English--unless the post is particularly useful and I can reasonably understand it. Sadly, most posts forum-wide don't meet those criteria. I love handing out merits to posts that deserve it, but the vast majority of posts by the non-native English writers aren't even constructive. Most are vapid nonsense obviously designed to meet the minimum number of characters such that the writer will get paid from the campaign he's in.