The Merit system is broken, very few people actually send merit to valuable posts, the vast majority of it gets circulated between old timers who know eachother personally on
the forum, and it doesn't help that most of these guys are on the Bitcoin related forums;
so while altcoin proponents now probably outnumber the Bitcoin maximalists, the merit distribution is disproportionately in favor of Bitcoin sympathizers...
You are wrong, perhaps
looking on some data will change your mind. Merit is doing it's job just fine regardless a minor number of abusive members using it for their own interest. Every system has a
System Loss which is completely ok.