I find the imgur links to be annoying, since that site always loads slowly on my PC--and in this case it's doubly annoying because the context of the merited post is missing.

There probably is a bit of bias toward high-ranked members with good reputations around here, but that's not something that can be proven.  And there are merit sources who have plenty of sMerits to give and are actively looking to help newbies out.  The problem, which has been stated many times in many threads, is that most new accounts these days tend to be people who have nothing useful to say but who are compelled by signature campaigns to come up with things to say anyway.  They're also usually not writing in their native language, and the result is that even if you can make heads or tails of what they're trying to say, the post is devoid of anything useful.

Thus, while that bias toward more well-known, well-respected members might exist, the bigger issue is the paucity of quality posts made by lower-ranked members.  If more newbies made better posts (and if you didn't have to wade through a morass of shitposts to find them), they'd be earning the merits they so desperately crave.

Meta is probably the worst section for newbies to earn merits, but they keep trying because they see a lot of older members earning merits here--but older members can see right through most noobs' intentions when they post in Meta, especially when they create threads about merits.

This is a great example of generic crap that keeps getting written by noobs.  Bad English, hard to read, and what's being said in the post has been written by more noobs than I can count.