The phrase "distinct merits" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to distinguish the outstanding qualities of someone or something. For example: "We all appreciated John's distinct merits as a leader which allowed us to push the project forward to completion."
Obviously, this is a political attack more than a diagnosis, but Christie's comments do hold one distinct merit: It's true that sleep and decision-making go hand in hand, an important fact to keep in mind before someone chooses to, say, make an important political call.
Both Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons are Origins Hall of Fame Games inductees as they were deemed sufficiently distinct to merit separate inclusion on different occasions.
We therefore prefer to recognize each of Clades N5 N7 as a distinct entity meriting equal rank, rather than combining them into the expanded genus Ponerorchis sensu Jin et al. [ 28].
Thomas mentions two distinct sources of merit of supererogatory behavior.
King has defended the hearings, saying that radical Islam is a distinct threat that merits investigation, even though such an inquiry might not be "politically correct".
Therefore, the possibility that weekly paclitaxel versus every 3-weekly docetaxel targets different populations of tumors is a distinct hypothesis that merits further investigation.
In partial order game trees, the outcomes evaluated at the tip nodes are vectors, where each dimension of the vector represents a distinct criterion of merit.
Viscum was originally thought to be distinct enough to merit its own family, Viscaceae, but recent genetic analysis has placed it in the family Santalaceae, the Sandalwood family.
The introduced house sparrow populations may be distinct enough to merit subspecies status, especially in North America and southern Africa, and American ornithologist Harry Church Oberholser even gave the subspecies name plecticus to the paler birds of western North America.
