Of course, spammers will come back someday after getting one merit to rank up back to Junior Member.
I believe that some of them almost ranked up immediately after the activation of new rank requirement.
It is reasonable because the merit distribution raised significantly after that day. (@coinlocket$ presented it in
another thread).
Of course it's not enough--that's obvious, because we still have a spam problem.
I don't know how the forum can manage it?
It might require a lot of time for forum mods to check, verify, then accept real projects and eliminate scam ones. Consequently, forum mods will have to word under massive pressure. I think they don't like it, and the forum has already been out of human sources by now (at least in terms of controlling spamming endemic in the forum, especially in local boards).
I don't think the solution is going to come from any tweaks to the merit system at all. It's going to have to be some rules imposed on bounty managers and/or ICO devs who want to use bitcointalk to advertise their shitty scam projects.