I'm not sure what the benefit is in brown nosing people especially the higher ranks because merit doesn't really have any advantage to them so you would be better just dishing it out to people who deserve it. People will for sure try to sell points and game the system but they already do that with account and feedback farming anyway so this system doesn't really change anything, but it certainly makes it harder for farmers to farm accounts now and at least stops people just signing up with hundreds of accounts because without some effort they'll go nowhere and this was a huge problem which needed to be addressed.
You would rather have signatures banned than this merit system? Can you not be bothered actually writing anything of substance? If you were here to have decent discussions then there would be no issue and those people will get the merit in due course, but now people actually have to put thought into their posts those one or two liners will get them nowhere. People who were making those sorts of posts shouldn't have been getting paid for them in the first place but this is another issue that needs to be dealt with because as long as alt coin campaigns keep paying people post quality will just drop once they've hit enough merit points and got onto a spam campaign.
Yes, I would have preferred that the signatures had been banned. I do not understand what's wrong with thinking about it.
I think the Merit system has been developed very badly, even if with good intentions.
Honestly, I think a post can have a good content even if it contains only a few words, it does not have to be very long.
Also, I generally write in my country section, so my "visibility" is really low.