Why claim a bounty once when they can claim it 10 times or 100 times? Abuse of signature campaigns and bounties by multi-accounting has been going on for years here. Merit simply means that these new accounts will not be able to rank up.
People should understand the benefit of merit :
For bounty hunters less competition so more rewards .
For the forum reduce the spam and increase the number of high quality topics .
So it's a win win game for real people using the forum while it's bad for those that use dirty ways to achieve their goal ( $$ ) .