This is the right way to assess a quality member because we have a lot of ways to earn merits and one good example is Pizza contest if you are good at then you can receive tons of em, which doesn't necessarily mean the poster is knowledgeable about bitcoin and the forum. Merit system made it a lot harder for account farmers to rankup but it should not be the only metric to evaluate a forum user and by the way many will agree that 'not every good posts receives merits and not every merit post is worthy of it'.