How do you propose users should be ranked then? I agree with your points, but it's easy to make complaints and harder to find solutions. Aside from creating some sort of centralized list, I don't think there's a statistic based way to approach this. Perhaps those with earlier registration dates could gain some recognition points, but other issues would arise from that.
Step 1 would be to not arbitrarily dismiss user merits that were earned through prior participation here. Step 2 would be for people to leave merit for historical contributions, and not just current posts. Also, Im a bit shocked users like Gavin Andresen have a 0 trust rating. In his particular case, satoshi trusted him to lead development on the Bitcoin client but hes regarded as not trustworthy enough to accept PayPal from? He was a major influence here whose first project when he discovered Bitcoin was to create a faucet to give it away. Users like him personally inspired me, so I think Step 3 would be finding and leaving trust for these users that they clearly earned prior to the trust system being implemented. Many probably dont realize there was a period of years before the trust system was implemented. I used to have a thread with dozens of quotes complimenting my efforts and listing successful trades that I would refer users to back then. All who were active back then didnt have the same opportunities to build long-term user stats that are available to users today. Penalizing them further with new scoring methods that reduce their early contributions seems backwards to me.
So thats off the top of my head 3 proposals for Vod and the community to work together on legitimizing and improving this type of rating system.