It'll be hard to get into the forum without some form of connections and they'll probably pay someone to give them merits. Probably would raise the bar of entry too high and isn't ideal.
Nowadays if you put in your search engine for bitcoin related discussions, bitcointalk threads are top of the list.
But I agree that setting the bar of entry too high might intimidate more than educate.
Newbie jail was a thing before, but it was stopped by theymos and I do not think it would be implemented again.
It makes the forum unwelcoming to new members, both the legitimate ones and the spammers, and if any is going to try and jump through the hoops, it would be the spammers.
Here is theymos' take on it;
Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.
You are more or less describing newbie jail, which was discontinued years ago. You had to spend X amount of time in a special newbie section before you could do anything else.
I see. Thanks, I never knew there exists such feature. I guess I have not scrawled the forum very much.
My stubborn self would like to push this argument: newbie is now different from Brand New.
). 
