I disagree that merits are easy to earn though and its as simple as making 50 quality posts to get 50 merits. If that was true we would see a lot more members that have ranked up but that is not true. We are seeing members who have been here a long time make hundreds of posts every month and not earn a single merit.
Sometimes, merits are easy to earn, sometimes are very difficult to earn.
Merits and merit-received posts are quality enough and deserve merits or not are very controversy problem, somehow endless one.
We all know that sometimes merits used as a tool to show agreement. It is surely opposite to what theymos wanted merits should be used.
Anyway, it is the fact in the forum, and there are hundreds of posts received merits that way, but the important thing is nobody will judge such posts are merit-abusing posts.
To judge posts which received merits are merit-abusing, lots of things should be considered before making any kinda causal inference.
I know there are lots of users received hundreds of merits for their posts in WO (Wall Observer) topic, but I will never call them as merit abusers.
If you notice, most of them don't wear signatures (paid ones, I meant). So they don't get any kinda benefits, especially financial benefits from any merit they got.
Back to the OP and his list, if he was able to find only 8 good posters from Cryptotalk campaign, and a week ago there was 500+ of them active, this only show that we are even far from 10% of them worth something. In the case of a normal campaign with selection, most good campaign managers would not accept more than 50 of them, which would be quite a sufficient number of participants.
I can not disagree with you. There is nobody pointed out that Yobit already reduced the maximum of daily post-cap to 10 for Cryptotalk's signature campaign. They likely do this due to their limited funds for that campaign, or that forum basically achieved early results that they expected at the beginning or they really listened to complaints from the community.
Update: limit from now is only 10 posts / day