- Personally, I don't expect to see any big change with such things. Even nowadays, it is more easily for lower rank members to rank up with softer behavior to send merit to posts like "like, love, etc.". It is actually kind of issue because more spammers will be able to rank up faster than they should.
Lowering some standards doesn't necessarily entail meriting bad posts; rather, it just means that you shouldn't evaluate new posts in the same manner as legendary ones. Various knowledge levels are present.
How Legendary members share so many merits among themselves is a little strange, but it raises interesting questions.

A brand new account or lower rank account is creating some very high quality posts. You are impressed. Sent out some merit. After few days you discovered the account is banned for plagiarism. This is one of the many scenario. But that does not mean that we should not send merit to lower rank member, we all do.
Yes, it hurts, and I believe this is one of the main reasons some established members have grown impatient at times. However, as you pointed out, this shouldn't prevent someone from meriting a newbie-worthy post; what happens to them after that is their problem, not ours. Ratimov found himself in a circumstance where a significant portion of the newcomers he ranked up were banned.
He's been inactive on this thread for some time now.
Help newbies and those who have a little left to the next rankWhen a good post is coming from a higher rank member, you know that he is not fishing for merit or at least some part of the posts are genuine.
Tagging a newbies posts as merit fishing attempts is another problem
