All true. But I don't think that's enough to kill Merit in that thread.
I suppose "popular consensus" deemed that it is not. I will live somehow, I suppose. However, I still think it would be fun to have an option to turn merits off when creating new threads. Could be useful if a thread creator wants to dissuade posters whose sole goal is to obtain merits...
Now that I think about it: Merit could be isolated there: I often see "+1 WO Merit" written in that topic. This could actually be made into a thing: WO Merit that only shows in the WO thread. Users could even have different ranks there than on the rest of the forum. And now that I type it, I don't think it's very useful (but it sounds fun).
I remember at some point one or two WO regulars did (somewhat jokingly) attempt to keep track of peoples' WOmerits. Then a
"game" was even developed to use WOmerits for making price prediction bets.