Congratulations on your merit achievement especially considering the time period (using activity score) it took you to get there. And you're right, any member who puts in effort to help other users through posting quality content or catching scammers would stand out from the pile eventually.

New members would naturally find it more difficult to use the forum, and I usually advice they take your approach of lurking in the forum for as long as it takes to get a hang of things before they create an account or become active.