No bloody joke the trust system REALLY is used as s childish little popularity contest.
Wrong. It is working as intended. One can not abuse his position on DT by giving too many unbased negative or positive ratings. There are probably more reasons to give someone a positive rating than a negative one. Abusing anything will get you removed and thus your ratings would lose their influence. I haven't looked into your rating, but anyone can leave you a negative if they feel that it is justified.
A nice example would be Mitchell and me. Even though we have never, officially or unofficially, conducted a trade of goods(yet), I would trust him with all of my coins (hot wallet).