Recently we can witness more and more newbies are entering the forum and trying to bring some contribution in the race if merit earning which is good to some extent because they are trying to bring something new but surely there is a drop in the real discussion lately especially after the people who can't run with the merit system, probably most of them were account farmers.
Loss of quantity that is replaced by quality isn't a bad thing in my opinion. Users come, and go, but we all stick around for the discussions. I would prefer to have less quality discussions, than having the place drowned out because of the abundance of poor quality discussions.