one of my friends quit because she envied others for their merit coz she had zero. Though I do think her words really don't deserve merit, her confidence wasn't satisfied anyway.
With such mindset, it's little wonder she found it difficult to get merits. Merits are of little value besides forum rank, a lot of members got airdropped lots of merit during the merit launch but have very little knowledge about the forum or Bitcoin.
The merit mechanism is to encourage everyone to communicate more and express their inner thoughts. No matter if your idea is right or wrong, if you express your opinion and are useful to others, others will give you merit.
Merits were implemented to ensure only those contributing quality content rank up, thereby discouraging spam content all over the forum, it was later followed by the newbie restriction, which was implemented for the same purpose.