I understand that you think the system is fair now and I respect your opinion.

However, why you (but also others) keep mentioning the art contest, as it would be an airdrop? That art contest consisted in hours of work for realizing art. In case you (or others) didn't take part of the contest, or in case you don't know what efforts are needed to create, then you should think again.

The art contest was no airdrop. The merits awarded there were for effort, for hours of labour, therefore I really don't understand why it matters if someone earned 300 merits there or 10. They were not airdropped; they were given for real work.

Do you think it is easier to create art compared to write a quality posting? If so, let's think about how many good artist are now in the world (no matter the field). Are they millions? Are they hundreds of thousands? I doubt. Now let's compare the total number of artists in the world with the total number of good journalists (who write quality stuff, similar to what is required from the forum's users as well). So how many journalists (good journalists) are there? Probably millions. The same happened here: there are two millions of forum users but only a few were given (more or less) merits during the contest. Writing is a thing, art is another thing. And the effort for creation process is bigger than for writing a quality post. You can write a good post maybe in 1h (or 2h or 3h or 10h), but some art creations realized by the participants took days.

That being said, I would expect more respect for those who created art pieces during the contest, instead of contesting the way they earned their merits.

Most likely, all those who keep mentioning the art contest, think it was an easy, effortless job. But that's wrong. However, OP was not determined by the merits I earned from the art contest, but by the opinion I have about how easy / hard is to earn merits. If you act normally and try to be a good user, the merits will most likely come to you.