I can say with a degree of certainty that if we have a 100 newbies sign up on the forum, 99 are bounty hunters recycled accounts. That one genuine user who understands how to game the system eventually ends up as a "Newbie in the spotlight" in the forum. But dont let my thought cloud your optimism because some of these "low quality" posters eventually become worthy of their rank and that will lead to merits being awarded to their posts.

There is also a lot of problem in the viewership of posts. Often good posts get buried in the flood of shitposts.

A highly merited post will get merited even more reducing the number of merit received by other well written or well though out posts. Such problems I believe are a design flaw of the system and cannot be corrected or mitigated at this stage.