To be fair towards the post-merit system newbies, it's harder now for them to rank up than it was in the past and before theymos introduced merits as a critical rank-up requirement. You didn't have to learn anything in the past, only your activity determined your forum rank. As long as your posts were good enough not to get deleted by the moderators, they remained and you gained activity, and ultimately rank. To advance in the forum hierarchy today, your posts need to matter for others to merit you.