The reason has been stated many times over the last month, and is part of the conversation in many already existing threads. Just to go over it once more, there was a change of rules on the 17/09/2018 where by Jr. Members are required to have at least 1 Merit. Newbies will therefore remain Newbies until they manage to earn 1 Merit (and >= 30 activity ofcourse). You can see the full explanation here: Enhanced newbie restrictions & requirements.

Getting one single merit is not difficult, but not dead easy either for many as we can see. The main difficulty lies in understanding what merit is about. This is not like turning a stone and finding a merit, nor is it a gold quest of some sort. It should be in reach of most people, providing the put time and effort into it. These two words are not said in vain here.

Let me give you an example: it took me nearly two months to get my first merit. During that time, I made some decent posts that went unmerited, and others that were not candidates for sure. This is not an automatic feature, but one that you need to be persistent on, trying to add value to the forum through your posts. One-liners rarely get you anywhere, so the forum requires us to racked the brain a bit and, again, invest time and make efforts.