I'm thinking of taking the extreme skeptical approach and taking everyone, including DT, off my trust list. That way no one will have green or red trust under their avatar and I can evaluate each person individually without any bias up front. Or does that sound completely retarded?
Sounds reasonable enough.
The trust system is a "shortcut" to evaluate people.
If you can and are willing to do your own due diligence, go ahead.
You'll be much less likely to be mislead by others' people's opinions.
The problem with excluding DefaultTrust, (and to an even greater extent, having zero trust list) is that it is very difficult to tell whose trust ratings you should trust and whose you should not.
Actually, when you rely on a centralized target for trust-scams like DefaultTrust, that's what makes it hard to evaluate. If you manage this for yourself, you automatically are more skeptical of everything, which makes you safer.
If everyone has a rating of "0" then it is very difficult to tell the fake trust ratings from the real ones. It would not be difficult to create a bunch of newbie accounts and give a bunch of positive trust ratings to yourself and this would be difficult to detect without any kind of trust list. The same is true for negative trust, as scammers often give retaliatory negative trust, and often troll other user's trust profiles,
Oh, like you did to me, "FunFunnyFan"
(
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=519804) aka Panthers52 aka ACCTSeller, aka ....
Using a custom trust list is also very difficult. When you create your own trust network, there will be a lot of trolls/scammers/non-reputable people that will get included in your trust network, and you will need to be very active in using exclusions.
There's no reason why "a lot of trolls/scammers/non-reputable people" will be included if you don't include them. When you take DefaultTrust at face value, you're adopting blindly and wholesale the main target of such confidence scams as you were trying to pull around here with your shenanigans last year. When you manage your own trust list, you add the people that you've had experience with, so, as usual, you seem to be perverting logic and turning reason on its head. The only real question is why. The best current answer is that you're planning or already managing a new crop of alts and trying to work your way back into position to pull off whatever exit scam you were planning with this account.