I remember the time before the introduction of merit when we just wrote in the forum without burdening ourselves too much with others and what others think of us.
Now it's different, everyone is struggling to get merit and advance in the forum.
Exactly and that's why the younger generation are now suffering for the way majority of earlier users treated the forum. Had it been "they" didn't spam the forum, all in the name of they don't care about what other thought of their posts, we won't had been in this situation now (having to require merit to rank up) but still though, kudos to them as due to their abusive ways we got a better system to stop account farming and probably reduce the rate of spamming in the forum.
The quality of post are steadily improving and healthy discussion are been observed in their numbers. Now we just have to get rid of or reduce the rate at which back scratchers are getting rewarded (i.e those posting to impress certain set of users) then the system will become perfect.