I don't usually look for people who have lots of trading experience, but for people who can leave what I believe to be accurate ratings. I have done very little actual trading here in the grand scheme of things, and was put on DT initially by BadBear probably for my ratings on scammers which he must have thought were accurate enough. At the time of that I'd probably only engaged in one or two actual trades here other than earnings from signature campaigns etc.
This is kind of at the essence of the problem, the people the rating system effects the most, traders, are pushed to the side and lots of political games are played to the point it becomes less useful for those that need and use it the most. IMO there needs to be a requirement of some kind of material loss that can be documented to leave valid ratings. Either this or some other form of feedback that is purely for anything OTHER THAN trade.
I think the trust system works pretty well in most cases, and these issues of reputable users falling foul of it for whatever are probably in the minority though, it's just that when they do happen they obviously cause the most drama and controversy and then suddenly the whole system is broke according to them because of that. Requiring that a user
actually be scammed though is counter-productive and does nothing for
preventing scams. Sometimes people come here and their only intention is to scam and when that's pretty blatant or highly likely they should be tagged as such rather than waiting for them to scam then leave them it by at which point they've probably just abandoned the account as mission accomplished. I think the system should probably be tweaked a little and people doing tiny trades of say things like $10-50 shouldn't count for much and certainly shouldn't make people 'green' trusted. As for higher ranked users with lots of trust/feedback who end up with a negative feedback or two for some dispute or petty quibble perhaps their long-history or trades should be taken more into consideration and it effects them less or not at all unless quite a few 'trusted' users also leave them feedback (in the cases of someone pulling off a long con or whatever (and sometimes some highly trusted users he do pull a dirty for whatever reason)). Whatever we do (or don't do) there's just no way we can satisfy anyone with anything we do regarding trust and as I've said multiple times before I've never seen a perfect feedback system any where. I remember years ago on eBay when both parties could leave negative feedback, but if you ever did leave the seller negative feedback for whatever reason they just neg-bombed you straight back. People have suggested in the past that two people have to 'agree' to a trade first before negative feedback can be left by either party but we'd just run into the same problem. Just look at all the retaliatory feedback people already get on here and it'd just be the same, though luckily feedback from 'unreputable' people doesn't effect your score, but then of course people also complain about that.
I honestly don't know what we could do other than get rid of the scoring system and there's just a log of trades but I think that would just cause far more issues than it solves and make scammners lives easier whilst reputable users with lots of trades look less reputable or 'trusted' in the process.