Good to hear your merit give-away tactics like this.
I decided to give my merits to persons of lower ranks, from newbie to senior member.
I don't think so.
Deserved threads are deserved ones, for sure.
I doesn't make sense if you have a opinion like "Wow, this is an excellent thread, deserved merits but I don't give that guy and his/ her thread merits because he/she has stood at higher ranks already". It sounds really weird, in my point of view.
Another reason is, giving your merits away to deserved threads from higher ranked members will help them having more sMerits to give away to others, including lower-ranked members.
I don't see any conflict of interest here!
I think it's not fair to give merits to high ranked users. I do not say that they do not deserve to, but what for they need it? But low ranked members really need it to raise. Unfortunately, posts I like and found informative and interesting in the most of cases belong exactly to high ranked members.
Plagiarism is one of the worst behavior in human society, including the BT forum.
This guy is pretty good, but the case of plagiarism made me to change my opinion about him.