Earned-merits or trust points are not determinant factors for post quality of posters. They are only one of componental factors and they serve as supplementary inclusive factors for poster's quality assessment.
I agree with what you wrote, we all know how easy it is to abuse merit system, especially those who owned few high ranked alt accounts and get a few hundred of sMerits at the very beginning. What to do when you see some one-line post completely irrelevant get 30 or 50 merits, and some others (including me) need to post maybe 50 quality posts to get the same number of merits.
Back to the OP and his list, if he was able to find only 8
good posters from Cryptotalk campaign, and a week ago there was 500+ of them active, this only show that we are even far from 10% of them worth something. In the case of a normal campaign with selection, most good campaign managers would not accept more than 50 of them, which would be quite a sufficient number of participants.