You have really explained problems of many newbies here as most of them are unable to express, many would have the same questions and would try to gain merits by the evil ways you mentioned, but yes it is more easy to gain it by putting useful content in any post I think anyone would surely notice it and respect your work on the posts and award you merits.

Many peoples have complaints that they are unnoticed here and only higher level members gain attention and merits too, but this is truly a wrong judgment as you can already see many peoples here who have more merits than there activity which is a great example to prove this judgment false.

I am getting across many newbies now with extraordinary post quality and this only happened after the merit requirements update, I guess its already a successful experiment.