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.
I get the point you are trying to make but these members listed here are those that were not active and have returned because of the signature campaign. There are many members in the campaign that are good posters and even better posters than some in other campaigns but they get drowned out by the spammers in the signature. Introducing the merit requirement would reduce this significantly and would probably benefit Yobit now that they have had their mass exposure they could refine their reputation by only including those that are substantial merit earners.
I disagree that merits are easy to earn though and its as simple as making 50 quality posts to get 50 merits. If that was true we would see a lot more members that have ranked up but that is not true. We are seeing members who have been here a long time make hundreds of posts every month and not earn a single merit.