Contrary to what a lot of other members think, I don't get off on being on DT2 and in fact it's a pain in the ass half the time. But since bitcointalk doesn't even moderate scammers, there needs to be some mechanism through which unwitting members can avoid being scammed and bad behavior can be punished, so to speak.
Diluting the DT list (=adding more DT users) would reduce that PITA.
I'm assuming your gripe is because of Vod's feedback, and he's one of the active ones.
Vod threatened to red-rate me unless I changed my rating. Threatening to abuse DT position, and then abusing it, has nothing to do with one's activity. DT are currently free to abuse as long as they keep it mild and "legit", and sadly some DT members take advantage of that possibility. Be a friend of 100, bully 1, and those 101 will be sticking together and ignore the wrongdoing (or find some unreasonable excuse). It's exactly the same as in politics. Nobody would care if that structure was not pushed on people by default. Such a structure should not exist in trust system, as trust system should not have any means of top-down authority whatsoever. This sort of mixture of trust network and moderation, that the current trust system sadly is, is not excelling at being a trust system or functional moderation.
So, if we eliminate the whole DT system right now without having a function that the active DT1/DT2 members serve, what would happen? All the cockroaches would have a field day, that's what. I hear lots of gripes but no suggestions about alternatives, and I'll admit I can't think of a different system that would be better either. I used to like the Scammer Tag thing that was in place when I was a lurker, but I do believe Theymos won't be going back to that.
I think the "
Force custom lists" idea by theymos is the best step forward. I think that a less dramatic change would be to dilute DT, add a lot more DT1 members, and see what happens.