I can see where you are coming from, but I really don't think it's necessary. You can see from suchmoon's thread that we are destroying around 4 times as many merits as we are distributing, even including all the airdropped merits that are being used. Similarly, as time goes on, airdropped merit becomes an ever smaller percentage of total merits, and merit sources effectively become the only source of merit.

As to OP's question, I always assumed users gave bounty/signature managers absurd amounts of merit as a way of trying to buy their favour or improve their changes of being accepted to the current or future campaigns.