But what happens to the genuine newbies who sign up to share their ideas on that forum? Who doesn't care about the merit system
True beginners will be recognized by the effort they put into sharing ideas and trying to gain knowledge. They will have no trouble getting merits or even rankings as I'm sure some of them currently have higher merit than activity.
The question would be: what about newbies that do put in such effort, but are simply more interested in advanced cryptocurrency aspects, maybe especially in the realm of smart contracts and this sort of stuff. They might be easily overlooked since most long-time visitors of the forum just ignore the Altcoin section due to the sheer amount of spam to sift through.
Even if they don't care about merits at all, they will have a hard time finding people to talk to when it comes to these technical subjects, because Altcoin spammers have no clue about them and technical Bitcoin people stay in the much better moderated Bitcoin sections.