The trust-levels are not meant to be single numbers indeed.
It is partly about trust, partly about quality and partly about insightful and more.
And maybe you would get a special prize if someone gives you votes for each of them.

My idea is that the forum has librarians.
Librarians are there to bring order in the chaos of information, using topics, keywords and different categories.
A librarian creates his/her own knowledge tree of topics, makes categories and keywords.
Also values the information in quality (or different qualities like: fun / nice / shock / learning / satire / solution ).
And as reader you can also value the information with normal votes, and vote they are doing their jobs.

You can subscribe to many different librarians and see the articles that they find good information.

It is like a list of links to articles on the forum, and how much it is valued by different librarians.
Sometimes you get a small article of links that are combined together to make it easier to study.

And by collecting and categorizing links you can also become a librarian yourself.
You may use the same links as other librarians do, but with a slightly different (and better) structure.
The articles that you upvoted can already become part of the library that you are building, without much hassle.

In a normal network this would exclude people with different opinions.
And therefore you need different values for trust and for quality of information.

By trusting you, I can see information that you are posting, and your comments to information.
If my trusted friends trust you, I can also see you.
It means that you are part of my basic trust network.

The quality network is a step further. Which means that I want to see what you are posting.
And I want to see your comments on the posts. This gives you higher ranking in my system,
but usually only for the categories that I valued your quality.

I can set the trust value lower to see people that are trolling and/or placing insults at each post.
Or people that blame the >whoever< for everything that happened.
And even lower to see people that are disrupting the forum, before they are banned.
But by default I only see people that are already trusted by the people that I trust.
This means that most users will see a forum that is nice and intelligent.
And new people first have to earn some trust before they will even be noticed.

But this is just a first idea, a lot more needs to be considered.