Only devs and admins should have smerit and they should reward it to the people making appropriate posts.
Devs? You sound like the type of person who labels anyone who's high-ranked or has a position of authority on bitcointalk as a "dev". I don't get this.
That is how some twitbook hunters calls their bounty manager. I think it stand for
developer or they have another meaning for it. I found some in ANN threads and bounties when I was reporting lately and I also used to call bounty managers "dev" before when I was a noob spammer
If that is what he meant by "devs" then we might see low ranking spammers become Sr. Members and above in no time. If we gave these bounty managers that don't care about spammers that power then we will see a flaw in the merit system. For one they are just bounty campaign managers they are not automatically qualify as a merit source, unlike the merit sources we have now which most go through the process of application just to be one.