It's not an incentive system. There are four ways to change behavior. Positive Reinforcement and Negative Reinforcement [these both encourage the behavior], Positive Punishment and Negative Punishment [these both discourage the behavior].

The merit system falls under negative punishment. The result of negative reinforcement is the decreasing of some behavior. Negative punishment is when you take away something good that the person wants in order to stop the behavior you don't want. But it really doesn't matter what you intend, if you take away something good people will stop doing what they think led to the loss of what they liked.

Walk up to your child and tell the child 'no more TV for a week' and the child will ask why, complain, and try to figure out what the child did to deserve this and what the child can do next time to maintain access to the TV.

That's called negative punishment. It's been a documented concept since Pavlov/Skinner and is sometimes called Classical Conditioning.

You are calling it an incentive system because you think 'we give merit for good behavior' but the big picture is, BitcoinTalk took away ranking based on activity alone and has now made it harder to rank up with ambiguous rules and a liquidity problem and really really high merit requirements for ranking up. That's almost the same as freezing ranking up. It's not exactly freezing, but it close.

The merit system will be seen as punishment for anyone who wants to rank up and has been involved in this community for over 10 months. I don't know their reasons for wanting it, but anyone who wants to rank up, and has been around for a few month prior to this change, after this merit system came out has been punished. Again, using the formal term of punishment in the sense of behavioral conditioning. I know how people on here like to debate about the meaning of words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punishment_(psychology)#Negative

Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.