Yep being Newbie or low ranked user is harder to get merit - its true but it's not imposible. Being the "fresh one" puts you on the spotlight and you have to work a bit harder than "oldboys" but it's just like in real life. When you are newcomer you have to show at first yourself from the good side.  So probably you won't get merit for the first good post or second one but when you write something really good noone would look at your rank and you will get plenty of merits.

Look at these posts below - they were wrote by newbies or low ranked users and some of ranked users found them very good and gave 20 or 50 merits to reward them:



And I also could show you a thousands good posts of ranked member which hasn't been rewarded but you can find them everywhere....
@xtraelv shoed you some of them: