I respectfully disagree. If merit sources had too many posts to pick from and less merit they'd be more pressure on them to focus on actually good posts by good members so they can reward their efforts by making them rank up.
I'll speak for myself. If I had less sMerits, I'd simply do what I had been doing before I become a merit source; merit the same posts, but with less merits. I don't feel like I have more pressure on meriting "good posts" now that I'm merit source. Whenever I find an interesting post, I simply merit it. That's all, and I'd say I'm biased to an extent to newbie posts, because I want to encourage them continue their journey and rank up.
But on the contrary, for the last few years we've had an oversupply of merit. But now that we have too much of it, nearly no one cares.
The whole point of the merit system is mainly to discourage shitposts. Even with an oversupply of merits, it still fits that purpose. It's just that high-quality posters get merited more generously and/or regularly.
New users just find hacked accounts to rank their own accounts through local boards and it gets lost in the merit circlejerks of users that have already reached legendary rank.
I certainly wouldn't rather to help a user who sees the forum as a milking cow instead of an Internet board, rank up. Why am I the one to blame and not them for being incapable to produce somewhat medium quality content?