The flawed trust system, plus the unregulated presence of scammers, shitposters, and account sales, along with the rift between camps of people sharing differing and often contentious views on all of those things--this is why the forum is a battleground. And the lack of strong leadership on top of everything. Ugh, what a mess.
Strong leadership isn't always about banning things out right, and I like the forums approach of trying to find solutions which don't limit legitimate users. Besides, when you have such a diverse amount of people who come to share their opinions about things there's obviously going to be a few clashes here and there.
There's guidelines to keep these sort of arguments and "battles" on topic. The trust system works somewhat in that it prevents a lot of scams from happening. Yes, there's a Default list of people that might not be deserving of that place but, that's why everyones encouraged to make their own trust list rather than blindly trusting DefaultTrust. It's partly the systems fault as well as it's users.