I would like to share my idea on this matter.
The forum needs to add a like feature we have on many social media platforms or upvote type feature, but not everyone can upvote/like the replies to come on top of the thread,
some trusted users of the forums are allowed to like/upvote the replies after reading them and deciding that is it a valuable reply or not.
And how exactly will this list of trusted users be updated? And how to reconcile this with the merit system? This will not lead to positive results, it will be even more subjective, than it is now, because there will be an even greater inequality between "trusted" users, which means - those who registered a long time ago and have many merits, and newbies and low ranks, for whom the chances of getting into the list of these trusted members will be even smaller than with the merit system.