If you mean the altcoin section of bitcointalk, I would disagree with you.  Those other sections I mentioned are just as bad as Altcoin Discussion.  I don't include the tokens or bounties sections in my assessment, as it's all spam there.

You say everyone is to blame for the shitposting situation, and I would argue that there's mostly a problem at the top.  There's a tolerance of this crap because it brings traffic and some people think that people spamming for signature campaigns is healthy to the crypto economy.  That's why OGNasty excluded me from his trust list--he thought I was somehow bullying noob shitposters.  So that's what you get when someone tries to do something about it.  If you recall in December and January, Meta was filled with people complaining about the tags actmyname and I were leaving for shitposters.  It's not as though we were standing around and accepting the deterioration of the forum.

My overly cynical take on newbies like OP who make suggestions about how the ranking system should be improved is that they're either 1) alt accounts looking for merits, or 2) just looking for merits.  Yes, I could be totally wrong but having seen so much of it since January, I've come to expect this sort of thing.  Before then, there weren't that many low-ranked members posting in Meta, since they were all too busy shitposting for their bounties.  Now that they need merits to rank up and earn more money, they've figured out where the merits are being given out (Meta is a big section if I'm not mistaken) and also which merit-source opinions to agree. 

If I've misjudged you, OP, try to understand where I'm coming from.  We'll see if your take on bitcointalk has changed in a year or so, if you're still around.