What is clear is that if you open threads (if they don't suck) it's easier to get merits. I don't know if they know it and that's why.
Being at the top of a thread gives more visibility than lower pages, but beyond that it does not increase merit chances, and just doing the barest minimum would not get you merits simply cause you're starting topics, your account could begin to stand out for posting hackneyed topics and put you in some ignore lists.
Lots of too users like o_e_l_e_o rarely start threads, but still gets lots of merits for quality contributions.
You are not mistaken. I meet this regularly.
There have already been several warnings that you should not trust the questions of newbies since they do not know that plagiarism is prohibited, and since they do not know anything, they copy information from somewhere (Reddit at the top)
and then they expect merits. The funny thing is that they get merit for their copied posts.
While I agree we should be carful who we give that first merit asbit could breed signature spam, we should also not be any more suspicious of newbie accounts than other ranks and they should not be generalized. There are newbies who know the rules better than higher ranked members. And in the event we are wrong; worst case scenario, the user gets banned and the smerits decay, a far lesser consequence than making ranking up for newbies difficult, imo.