I'm sure theymos had plans to release a data dump on the full merit transactions just like he has with other things.
Already available. This file updates every Friday and shows every merit transaction in the last 120 days:
https://bitcointalk.org/merit.txt.xzHonestly I don't see it as that big of a deal that merits get removed every 120 days. Yeah, it might be nice to know the merited posts, but only a select few would actually browse them, and take a look. The majority of forum users won't care for it.
True. Only the minority of the users will use the merit history as a bookmark function. For most, it's useless as they only merit the users to help (the deserving ones) to rank up. And not to mark the posts they like.