The people who don't like it are usually the exact type of people the merit system was implemented to stop in the first place. In fact, I think the merit system should be even stricter in some aspects and there should be a merit requirement to become a Junior Member. We can already see that the merit system works because low quality posters likely won't ever rank up past Junior and there's going to be a hell of a lot of people who never make it past that rank, but it's useless when anyone can create an unlimited amount of Junior members here and get paid for them and not having a requirement just forces users to make multiple accounts to maximise earnings from bounties. That's why I'm a big proponent of removing signatures from Juniors and requiring some minimal amount of merit to become one.

With that being said, the system probably needs some tweaks. More merit sources need to be added and people should probably start being more generous with their merit (myself included), or I wouldn't necessarily be against lowering the merit requirement of some of the higher ranks as even for a good poster it may take a very long time to get there but that will become apparent over time and whether it works efficiently or not and can be tweaked and tailored as needed.