Nullius is a phenomenon, you can behold his quality and take him as an example as an intelligent human being, but you can't take him as an example for proving that the merit system is working. Since Nullius is exceptional, and probably THE ONLY ONE in the whole bitcointalk forum who has taken so many merits in such a little time, you would end up proving the exact contrary than intended, ie that the merit system can work only for a few exceptional members and not for the thousands of average ones. You can't tell people: come on, start to write books, everyone can, look at what Shackespeare could write, without even having a computer and a wordprocessor at hand!
Why not use him as an example? If you make intelligent posts you will get rewarded appropriately. You probably don't even have to make posts half as good as him to get merit, but the system works in that if you put in the effort you will be recognised for such and those users who are just here to write "I like bitcoin because it gives me profit and profit is good because it helps me with my daily needs" are going to get nowhere as they should. Exceptional users will fly through the ranks, good ones will get there pretty quickly, average users will take quite some time and shitposters will hopefully never get there. If the progress follows like this then the system will work as intended.
I totally agree that Nullius can be shown and taken as an example to follow, even though 99% of the people have neither his culture nor his intelligence nor his perfect knowledge of the English language to be actually able to properly or even remotely follow his example. However, he can be still shown as an "idealistic model" to get inspiration from, like people would get inspired by Nietzsche or Ambrose Bierce without of course being able to write Jenseits von Gut und Böse or The Parenticide Club themselves.
But what I wanted to really say is that you can't take him as an example for proving that the merit system is working, since he is a quite unique case. I believe the merit system would work fine if only there would be many more sMerits in circulations. Now it's more or less just a "liquidity problem."
