The second thing is that a lot of your posts are in Bitcoin Discussion, where everybody's brain cells go to die. I did not check to see how many pages the threads in which you made your posts had, but that section is one of the ones that has a lot of spam megathreads--or at least it used to; I don't know if that's still true, but it's always been hard to earn merit there.
I like to post in BTC discussion, especially on the new topics that are good and that are actually about BTC. The problem with BTC discussion board is that members start too many unnecessary topics there, so many of them are not even actually about BTC, and many of them are lies about what they did to aid BTC adoption, these new unnecessary topics dominate the board and push many of the topics that are actually about BTC down and away from where merit sources can see and merit the users who participated in the discussion. There is a lot of good posts being made in the BTC discussion board, but many of them are unmerited.
If you see a really good post and feel it deserves merit, post it here
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5093271.0 . Loyce is the nicest most helpful guy you could meet here, but make sure the posts truly deserve merit, otherwise you’ll be ignored going forward if you ask him to merit just a typical nothing special post (basically begging for merits is what this means).
Saying about LoyceV being the nicest person to hand out merits could have been doubtful to me but I remembered way back when I needed about 14 merits to rank up to full member. LoyceV located me randomly and handed the 14 merits to me and that was the first and last time I go such a surprise if I am not mistaking.
I have benefit twice from Ratimov ranking up thread. Although I have never visited LoyceV report unmerited posts thread.
What I understand about merits is that you will work for it and chase it.
Even if you keep making quality posts without calling the attention of the merits sources to your quality posts, they will go unmerited.