As the decent campaign managers are starting to add an earnt merit requirement we will start to see which high ranks are spammers and which aren't.
Yup, it's a good attempt to bring everything back into balance so that accounts hacked and sold to spammers have much lower chance of becoming useful to them. On the other hand it makes accounts with some merit more valuable. As long as the requirement is kept low, like 5 earned merit per member, it's still easy for account traders and hackers to make it, especially if they have a high level account which allows them to trade their own merit.
Since the rank requires activity points along with Merits (now), and activity points are earned by posting, then resetting every single member of the forum to lower ranks would have meant to delete all the posts they have made until now which is the only way to reset their activity points, and doing that would have cleaned the complete forum and there would have been no posts in any section of the forum after the new system which would make no sense at all.
Are you sure that there's no way to reset rank without deleting posts? Posts allow you to earn activity over time. If you only reset the activity counter the rank will drop along with it leaving the posts intact. We'd need a staff member to clear this out.
Besides, not all the higher rank members are undeserving, and they all earned their positions by being active on the forum for so many years since it only required activity to rank up before the Merit system. But still, what I said earlier is the reason why theymos could not reset all the ranks and demote every single user of the forum. It would then be a reset for the forum itself which wouldn't be a good thing for any of us.
I did not say they are undeserving, but the topic is about inequality. I'm simply making a point that this inequality does exist.