I have been looking into new currencies to mine. I didn't see any that brings something new to the table. They all looked like a copy-paste of one other. So because of that I think Merit needs a little backing, deserves some credit. Hope you reach your goals

I agree. What got me excited is it's not your typical ERC20 copy/paste project. Has some unique elements to it for sure
One thing even die-hard Merit users might now know is that the Merit virtual machine provides many new instructions over bitcoin including CHECKOUTPUTSIG which is critical in supporting decentralized vaults and other covenant type features. You can read about that in the bluepaper (
https://www.merit.me/uploads/2018/bluepaper.pdf). This feature has been in production since the beginning.