The merit system was not designed to stop fighting among forum members, it was designed to stop spammers from being able to rank up.
There is a lot of fighting among cliques of forum members. There are probably at least 5 threads with various disputes in both Meta and Reputation that are posted in at least daily.
When people want to begin fighting, they always find reasons to start 'wars'. Reasons (in their opinion) can be trust system, negative feedback, flags, disaggrements, merit system, and more ones.
For the merit system, I feel happy with it because despite of the fact the system takes me 2 years to become a Hero Member and many decent efforts to move and get what I have had now. It restricts spammers to rank up to higher ranks and in the same time it allows good users to move upward on higher ranks. People who can rank up with the merit system are different and they deserve that. Their efforts are and will be recognised by the community (from the merit they received and from the reputation they built up) and by the campaigns' managers (it will them having higher probability to be chosen by managers of good campaigns). All of that, help them having good bonus income during their time on the forum.
Hate? I don't see any reasons to hate the others, starting with the merit system.