However, I witnessed the current trust system long enough to see how it isn't working as intended.
Well, see, this is your opinion. Its not necessarily shared by everyone else. Of course it does not work as intended 100% of the time - rarely does anything - but I think it is largely self-correcting and for the most part manages to keep out bad actors (again, not with 100% success). I haven't actually seen any serious complaints that could be resolved by an actionable solution, other than theymos intervening to resolve somebody's individual problem, which he's not going to do.
Reading various comments and posts from Theymos, it's evident to me that he expected the majority of members to participate in the voting so that the default trust list would be a good representation of what the majority of members would agree on. Obviously, this isn't the case now because only a small minority of "active" members participate in the voting.
That's not necessarily true. What statistics are you using to back this up?
But until then, everybody's best weapon to fight abuse is to get involved in the trust system and, obviously, grow some balls.
This part I agree with 100%.