This situation will be at least as annoying as the spam that occurred after the introduction of the merit system. The measure was long overdue and many users were asking for it. 
I'm calling it the "pissed off newbie invasion". I expect for a few weeks at least we'll have half a dozen threads opened addressing the new implementation, and everyone rehashing what has already been said in the main thread.
There are two kind of newbies now:
1. Who want to rage against the new system and this is why he/she opens a new topic in meta
2. Who wants to get merit immediately and starts a topic and writes in a style that will catch the merit sources' eyes, like advicing other newbies to create decent posts in order to get merit and stop crying, etc...
They should all go into one topic, it could grow 20 pages in a day and the merit sources would have an easier task if they really want to search among those users.... (or not...)
And Meta would be much cleaner, like it was 3 days before...