Very long post, can't quote one by one since I am on mobile phone. First thing is this forum isn't anything related to financial investments or something similar that investors will check Alexa rank before invest. This forum has created for discussion regarding bitcoin and related stuff. So either merits system is exist or removed you will able to make discussion. No one will prevent you from it. So why you are worried about merits?
Whoever left this forum for merit system they were just a spammer. They never contributed themselves for forum. So who care even they left or stay? If you are a good contributor and good poster on this forum you don't need to worry about merits.
So for forum, traffic or Alexa rank isn't much important. The most important part for this forum is healthy discussion.
I think today is my first time of seeing a site that doesn't care about their Alexa ranking. Hmm, like you said "quality discussion" without enough readers isn't it a waste of information? How about the people that will be searching for this forum and what they will see is other crypto blogs that pop out on search engine.
Whoever left this forum for merit system they were just a spammer
you can't be sure of that. Because you didn't leave this forum from the start doesn't mean you should show less care about the users that left the forum. I'm not worried about the merits, I'm worried about the people that left the community because they got no merit after all the time they spent on the forum.
You can't predict the exact reason why some people leave the forum. Most of them are not here to spam. I know how difficult it is to get to the top in this forum. That is one of the reasons people leave here, and most of them don't surf here enough to know that they is a sub-forum for their respective countries and continent that can welcome them and make them feel at home.
We need proper guide that's all