I agree with the OP with the merit system of letting a user to pay a fee to rank up. Then the accounts should be distinguish from ranking up due to merit and ranking up due to a paid fee.

My opinion about the forum now is not a user-friendly. Newcomers will just tend to have a couple of post then leave the forum. This because they need to get merit before ranking up. Ranking up is one of the motivation for a user to continue on learning about bitcoin and later on will invest. Base on my experience I do not really believe in bitcoin but later on I started to learn and invested a little bit on it. That was the time when a user can rank up to jr. member even without getting merit.

However, it will be hard now to get more bitcoiners here in the forum. The forum has set to be for the good and elite users that could easily get merit on their posting skills. Again it is not a user friendly anymore. I know that the merit system was to eradicate shit posting but this problem is not about the forum. The real problem is the bounty campaign and signatures so what to regulate here is not the user to rank up but the bounty signature campaign through the bounty managers. A set of guidelines will do I guess.

-edited.