Agree! There are different ranks of users complaining about merit system. They complained, moaned, cried mainly because they can not compose high-quality posts or they are account-farmers and don't have enough of time, and ideas to write such high quality post.
Complaining that you being a newbie will not help. Obviously its the merit posters whom you are trying to impress or trying to get their attention by this method of pseudo-begging under a "newbie" blanket.
Actually, I like design/ layout of the forum (I am not sure which word is exact because I am not IP epxert). It's simple, I like simplicity and minimalism. Furthermore, there are lots of better-designed forums than bitcointalk, but those designs can distract users to the main points (contents of threads/ topics/ whole forum). And I guess this is one of the reason why merit system launched, to control spamming endemic that come from spammers/ account-farmers. Those ones simply tried to wear signature and take money, covered the forum with tons of shitty posts.
There are so many things people dont like about this forum. Its layout is bad, its software is old and trust system if fucked up and now you people are complaining of the merit system. If you have so many things in the forum which you dont like, then why stay in this forum? Leave this forum. At least a chunk of shitposters would be removed in this manner if they follow my advice.
Give merit system more time, it will change the forum better (both quality of threads/topics/ users and control the exponential growth of user quantity) certainly.