I think you should consider the ability to buy merit for yourself. You can already effectively do this by way of purchasing a copper membership. Based upon the fact that well under 1% of active users have received a single merit, there need to be additional ways for people who do not post garbage to rank up.
Buying merit or normal ranks is like buying yourself a bunch of trophies to put on your shelf. It's stupid, and it's an insult to everyone who achieved it legitimately. I can't see ever doing that. I don't particularly mind letting people pay for some of the privileges of these things, such as with copper membership, but it should be a parallel system.
Copper membership is good. Now, if you want to participate in signature campaigns, you can either pay the $10-$20 for copper membership or accomplish the herculean task of making one good post. I don't think that it's unreasonable in either case.
If people are making good posts but are still struggling to get merit, then that's a problem with the merit system and should be fixed on my end. Demanding money in order to bypass a broken system would be really bad. But AFAICT the merit system actually is reasonably effective at identifying good posters.
My concerns are not necessarily regarding needing one merit to achieve Junior member status, in fact I would think it would be net beneficial to require a $10 payment to participate in a signature campaign, although a smaller nominal fee may be beneficial to prevent things like spambots and those who are getting paid to bump ANN threads, although changes to the ordering of threads is probably a better way to address the later issue.
My concern is more surrounding the number of merit required to rank from Member up to Full Member, and higher. Very few people to date have received sufficient merit to rank up to Full Member or higher. I would argue that if someone pays for the benefits of a Full Member status, they have incentives to continue to make not-garbage posts.
I don't think we should do away with the activity system, and believe that activity should continue to play a role in users' ranks.
I currently have received more merit than everyone in the forum except for 218 people, and I have not received sufficient merit to achieve Senior Member status, but am a Legendary member only because I was grandfathered in. However I have pretty much always been able to obtain above market rates for signature deals (even after receiving negative trust) when I have been active and been trying to actively sell my signature. Surely there are more than 220 people who make sufficiently good posts to be a Senior Member.
An ideal system in my view would be for someone to pay maybe a dollar to become a junior member (that would not allow signatures of any kind), pay $10-$20 to become a Member/Copper Member, and from there, can pay some additional amount to rank up further provided they have sufficient activity, perhaps even sufficient activity after becoming a Copper Member to become a Full Member, and so on.
Edit:changed full membership to senior member. However I have barely received sufficient merit to become a full member.
and giving up is not the last choice, keep on getting excited 
