I am tired of so many complaints about Merit/sMerit. It is most certainly a step in the right direction towards improving the quality of discourse on this forum. That being said, a very small minority of complaints about Merit/sMerit may be of value.
One of the things people complain a lot about is that there are not enough Merits to go around, especially in some local/niche threads. The number of Merit sources have been increased, and this should partially help the situation. However, there needs to be a way to shut the complainers up once and for all. Therefore, I propose the following - Recommend for Merit.
What is Recommend for Merit?
Recommend for Merit would be a button available on each post. You can recommend your own post or any other high quality post that you think hasn't received any Merit but deserves it.
What Does it Do?
There would be a way for all the Merit Sources to see, in a single view, all the posts that have been 'Recommended for Merit'. If they think a post deserves Merit, they can give merit to that thread and that removes the post from the list of awaiting posts. Perhaps they also have the ability to remove low quality posts from this list (or only Mods).
What About Abuse?
This would be the biggest problem. So perhaps you can limit the number of posts that can be recommended for Merit based on the user rank or some other criterion.
What About Rewards?
Similar to reporting spam, if a user repeatedly identifies undervalued posts for Merit and the posts are subsequently Merited, they can optionally be rewarded by the Mods/Merit Sources.
What About Punishments?
There may be a staked game where users stake their own Merit to recommend their posts. But perhaps the most effective way would be that if some users abuse this system, they get awarded negative merit.
Idea in Progress. Feedback Welcome