If people are making good posts but are still struggling to get merit, then that's a problem with the merit system and should be fixed on my end.
Without a doubt I agree in some point that getting merits even though you are making good quality post is too hard for the most of us here. In my opinion, there are reasons why a certain person doesn't receive any merits because:
1. He is not that famous here in the forum, I mean based on what I observed on this forum, most of the members that gets merits are those who have higher reputation in this forum, well I guess that can't be help since they are really making good quality post, but I think getting merits depends on how much we appreciated that certain person, if we know that he is making good quality post, let's say for example we read someone's post but his name is not familiar to us yet the quality is good, we will have a second thought if we are going to give him a merit, unlike when we are in the situation that we see a post from a very famous people here, and automatically we give them merits without hesitating.
2. His post has always been buried in the previous thread because of the spamming post made by the shit posters, making it hard to be find.
3. Most of the merited posts are in this thread, if I'm not mistaken, I rarely see post on the other threads like Bitcoin Discussion, Economy and Altcoin Discussion that has been merited by someone. I know you'll say that there is a lot of spammers in those threads, but there are some who are making good quality post too.
Again, this is just my opinion.

That's right, but not all the hard limits for newbies will solve the spam problem here. Why admins don't receive priority preferences for posts from members who have been rated, may be shown first or will be preferred on page 1 or page 2, and the following pages will still be displayed Posts from newbies.
I am also a newbie, and so lucky when i got 1 merit of try hard in my posts, but obviously this puts a label on all the newbie, and management is creating a big limits for newbies that they're trying to contribute this forum.