Plus, the section matters. Technical discussion is always going to get more merit, as people generally learn a little more or have interesting discussions, and debates. Gambling discussion doesn't get nearly as much, which a lot of newbies tend to gravitate towards. The altcoin section in general has been boycotted by a lot of users, on its reputation alone.
Well, lets talk about gambling discussion first. I'm not going to merit a guy just because they posted that some club just signed a player, or they predicted the outcome of a game, or anything quoted from a news article. Anybody can do those things, and we have a responsibility to regulate the ranks pipeline so that we suddenly do not have Legendaries and Heros running around with garbage posts wearing signatures from the highest bidder.
If we let that happen, then Bitcointalk campaigns will have a lower standard, and less projects will use that advertisement mode in the future.
Sure, one can argue that there are already a swarm of legendaries making garbage posts in gambling discussion, and there is nothing much that we can do about that. But we have to prevent even more of this type of poster from cropping.
Otherwise, what will happen is that bounty (yes bounty) campaigns will be full of these type of people, and the projects that they are advertising will suffer because they are all congregating in gambling, and altcoin discussion with all the other bounty participants, and the advertisements will be wasted as nobody is going to wade through 5 pages of posts on megathreads (the high-quality and low-quality ones alike). So without this advertising, the campaigns will stop, and the bounty campaign industry will basically implode, with websites taking their advertising elsewhere.
Maybe they'll even degrade Bitcointalk to a low-quality forum as cryptotalk. I don't think anybody desires this outcome.
Above does not apply to signature campaigns as managers already do a fine job of screening applicant's posting quality first.
One can argue that Bitcoin Discussion & Economics, maybe even Service Announcements, could use some more merits than what's already being distributed, and I would agree with that.
Now as for Altcoins, it's hard to merit a board that you don't even browse, and this is the case for most merit sources here including myself. I'd say there are several posts inside that are worthy of merit that simply haven't been read by a merit source yet (owing to being in Altcoins board). So this area is a work in progress for merit-sources. Of course, its not possible to find every single merit-worthy post, owing to the sheer volume of this board, but it's a board we could improve on.