This isn't something that bothers me, but with the little controversy about votes vs merits in the pizza voting, I thought: what if it were possible for the OP to activate/deactivate the possibility of giving merits in his topic?
Well, when I brought the idea up in my "Disable merits in WO" thread, I remember you had this to say about it:
It would be completely unfair to block an area of the forum from merits, harming users who make a clear effort to write good content for the community.
Its one thread -- one thread in one child board of one subsection of the entire forum.
You're just helping me!
Which makes it even more difficult, technically speaking, to make a topic not capable of receiving merit. I don't know if you know programming, but the way the software works would require major changes for this to be done. It's one thing to configure a board for this limitation, another is a specific topic.
Furthermore, this could set a dangerous precedent where whenever the subject of a topic was bothersome, the merits would be disabled. Someone is very dangerous that line of reasoning.
Sounds like its a difficult change to make.
I'm for it, just like there's an option to lock a topic or disable its smileys. I can't think of an example for its usefulness right off the bat, other than the WO thread, which was already extremely popular before the invention of merits.