The core intent of merit is to award it to posts with a fairly decent content, with no conceptual restrictions on the nature of the context at hand. In the case you are referring to (as with others), the post is just a textual summary of an implementation that has a lot of work behind the scenes, and that has a large impact on the forum. Merit in this case is a symbolical appreciation for the implemented system.

Now obviously not all those that are merited require merits to rank-up, but the conceptual goal is not to aid in ranking-up as a primal directive.

Having said that, I’m one of those that considers that ranking-up speed is rather slow for the general set of forum members that post decent content and are what can be considered positive contributors.