Yep. Just reaching ranks means bigger pay in all the bounties, for basically the same job.
The problem is that many come to this forum only to earn money. This spoils the fun in the forum, fills it with nonsense and so on. Many of them may not even care about crypto.

People don't plan for long term and I think that OP should have emphasized this much more: if you go from day one for "how to get merit?", you most probably get either banned for plagiarism in less than a year, either get negative feedback for doing something fishy, either find almost impossible to rank higher than maybe Member. All this meaning no pay or low pay, so the opposite of the initial intention.

OP is right. Learning, reading before answering, keeping the discussions at useful and informative levels will be in the benefit of everybody involved and in a year or two you may be thanking yourself for going on this path.