But you mean globally, don't you? For example, I don't really understand how the DT1 lottery works, and I don't think most of the forum does either.
I think most users understand it roughly, but not in detail. It's not even possible to reproduce the exact details, best I can do is
an incomplete estimate. Theymos likes creating complicated systems

I get the idea behind it, but the end-result is that many people understand it a bit, many people use their own interpretation, and you'll need to thoroughly study it to understand all the details. And even then, chances are there are some
unintended side effects.
So, if the Merit system would ever get big changes, I kinda expect it to become more complicated. This for example:
If you wanted to implement Merit in a decentralized forum (ie. one in the vein of Freenet's Frost or FMS), you could do it in this way:
- Everyone can, from their own perspective, give unlimited merit to posts, and these merit transactions are put into files which each user publishes via the decentralized system. (Like a merit.txt.xz which every user publishes.) Unlike on bitcointalk.org, you can also give people merit without an associated post.
- For everyone who has merit, you download their merit-transactions-list, but scale down/up all of the numbers so that the total merit that they send is equal to the actual sMerit that they own. It might or might not be useful to do this via some sliding time frame scheme so that merit transaction amounts aren't just continually diminished over time as they increase in quantity.
- Apply the above step recursively, creating a web-of-trust-style merit network
Then every user has a subjective merit score for each post (sort of like the bitcointalk.org trust system, which was inspired by FMS). And if you wish, you can assign people to be merit sources from your perspective by sending them large amounts of merit directly; these might or might not appear in the merit-transactions-list which you publish.
I can imagine theymos creating a DefaultMerit list, with DM1, DM2 and custom Merit lists. Spammers would Merit each other and see each other with high ranking accounts, while users who didn't add them to their Merit list won't see any of their "earned" Merit....