You will be surprised at how easy it is to increase the rank of someone who sincerely learns something. Just look around and forget the bounty section.
Actually he doesn't have to forget it if he has good intentions to learn and improve the quality of his posts. I used to be a bounty hunter too but I managed to get merit when promoting bounties, especially in the signature program. It's about how I maximize the time to gain knowledge because actually one can still learn something regardless of what he is promoting.
Most people might think that if users still promote the bounty then they won't get rank, I think that's not true because after all rank and merit will be easy to achieve depending on the quality of the post. But the problem is that many users don't really care about the quality of the posts because maybe knowledge is the reason. So whatever they promote as long as they care about quality then I'm sure they will get merit and rank.