For the meriters, I can understand the argument for red-trust, but I tend to think that it's at the wrong level. If the meriter was meriting it because they were actively thinking, "I want to make the forum really vicious, where everyone is constantly tearing each other apart for stupid things, and this post moves in that direction," even that's not really a trust-relevant motive, just a very unhelpful motive. And probably the meriters were thinking more innocent things than that.
Neg.-rating someone just because they sent out 1 merit is completely backwards and proper trust abuse in my view. It's similar to political de-platforming.