Actually it is true that some members will get better in their post quality with the passage of time, and surely some members might well be trying to earn merits, and I can see why you may well consider the term "fishing for merit" to be derogatory, and maybe even presuming way more bad intentions upon the newbie (or the lower ranking member) than such member deserves. So yeah, sometimes merit sources may well expect members to have to jump through way too many hoops before sending any smerits.
It's fine if they want to see people have to go through some hoops to get merit, but it's a bit scary if most people follow this trend. It's hard to come up with a good idea for a topic because actually most of the ideas have been discussed previously by many other users. So this is the real reason why newbie or low ranking users try to get other ideas but unfortunately some of those initiatives can be judged as merit fishing.
It might be good to be a little stingy with high ranking members who could logically do better on this forum based on their contributions and the quality of their posts. The merit system has to be sharp in two directions, it doesn't have to be sharper for high rank while we have to be a bit blunt to low rank
[that's really unfair, IMO]. But at the end of the day, the merit system is not moderated and each source has their own way of going about how they spend their monthly sMerit supply. I'm not against it, but I want to share my opinion.