I appreciate the helpful comment. I saw a post awhile ago about someone talking about how participating in a signature bounty lowers the chances of earning merit because it shows that the user wants to do bounties, rather than providing value to the forum or something like that.
There's no connection about merit and bounties/signatures. If the post you're doing is valuable and it helped others then you deserved to get merit. With your post on altcoin discussion, mostly people in the forum doesn't have interest on it so only few or most are the new people that came in are only looking to that post. There are threads that are helping other members to rank up.
Look at this thread -->
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2727673.0 they are under the "giveaways".