You give Merit to many random people. It would be foolish here to look for a cause-and-effect relationship.
There is a cause and effect relationship--all the posts I gave points to I liked and thus merited them. But I've only got a limited number of sMerits, so I have to ration them. And I usually only give them out for posts that are in really good English. Spelling, punctuation, and grammar all count in my book. Typos I can excuse, but some people just can't write. I don't merit posts that look like they were written sloppily.
Other people have different criteria, I'm sure. That's what's going to make this system work.
I completely agree with you, I like the course of your thoughts. The boundaries for obtaining Merit should be much wider than the "High Quality Post".
Since in the pursuit of Merit, we can see soon many pages of plagiarism.
@OP,you don't have to open a thread in Meta as I have reported the account with nice description with your links and they're likely to get perma-banned soon.Nice catch though.Most of his posts seem copy-pasted.
Thanks for help, it was very benevolent.