The majority of ratings seem to be warning people about red flags, not punishing provable scams.
A lot of the controversial ratings are highlighting what is often a far cry from a "red flag" although it is often framed this way; there is often a weak/no link between the highlighted "red flag" and the potential to scam in the future. There are also some instances in which someone is displaying a lot of actual red flags, and would be appropriate for them to be labeled a "scammer" because the only reasonable explanation is they plan on scamming in the future.
I would argue when there are a small number of "red flags" AND when all the red flags taken together do not indicate this person will (try to) scam in the future, a neutral would be most appropriate.
Predictability and guidelines are often good. I wrote some Trust guidelines recently, and I may write more. But I don't believe in having a set of hard rules which is to be applied to all cases.
The guidelines have little effect if you are explicitly saying you will not enforce them (within the DT network).
If you have a set of rules and exceptions are consistently being made (or not being made) to a certain person or group of people, then perhaps there is a problem. If there is clear overreach, without accountability or at least an explanation or defense of a rating, there is another problem.
When the DT system was first introduced (or at least when I joined the forum), those on DT1 were businesspeople with a lot of (ongoing) trading/business experience within the forum. These people would select who would be on their trust lists, and when someone they "sponsor" did something wrong, their reputation would somewhat suffer, especially if this person was not removed from their trust list. A good example of this happening was CITM who had an outsized trust list that was not kept up with, which resulted in many scammers eventually getting onto DT via him; after some time, it became widely known his trust list was not good, and there became calls for him to be removed from DT1 (IIRC, he was only removed when he gave a frivolous rating to Dogie, which IMO was far too late).
I think a good solution to DT troubles is to display the sponsor of each rating for ratings given by someone not directly on a person's trust list. For example, if I was looking at
kano's trust page, I would see a rating from
-ck, who is in my trust network because theymos, OgNasty and cyrus all sponsor him, who are all in my trust network because they are trusted by DefaultTrust, so adjacent to ck-'s rating would be an indication I am seeing this rating because of themos, OgNasty and cryus, and that each of them are in my trust network because of DefaultTrust. This would give a bigger incentive for those on DT1 to maintain a trust list comprised of good/accurate/fair ratings.
In addition to the above, the DT1 selection criteria should be changed back to those who have an ongoing business interest in the forum marketplace.