It's a neverending battle. There will be those disgruntled users posting here from time to time.
And being a non-self-moderated thread, it's up to the mods to do the work.
Mods are just the manual adjustment to a system that under load has to be self adjusting mostly. I think the eventual use for merit might be that people can choose to ignore the zero merit people as being the most likely source of nonsense on the forum. Its not a perfect filter but as an option it could be useful to do that. However they need more merit sources to allow people to get at least 1 merit for anyone who is making an effort. Also if they really wanted to empower people they could allow them to spend a merit to remove a merit from someone else who chooses to dump trash like this, I'm not sure they have any intention to expand in that way but I'd like to see it personally