Posters with some or many received merits don't mean they are quality posters and you can not only look at merit numbers to assess their quality. Read their posts, and their merited posts to assess their post quality.
PowerGlove has this
Rank up / down thread.
That's what I'm trying to emphasize, to be honest. I believe merit is already a prestigious system, and the forum doesn't need to copy features just because we know they were cool elsewhere. That doesn't mean they have to be implemented here too. I think theymos wants it to still feel like the classic Bitcoin Forum.