While i agree that this applies to a large group of people, I would carefully apply it to many others, earning merit in itself is a sort of skill, you will find many members with little to no knowledge of how BTC actually works and still have thousends of merit (not going to mention names but they are all over), on the other hand, with a random example of Kano and CK who would be in the top 10 of the most knowledge and beneficial users to Bitcoin EVER only have a few hundreds earned merit.

While the merit system in general is a good indication of the user's performance, it can be entirely misleading in many cases.