SteamTrades rep is useless.

What is to stop people who traded the $0.01 skins you speak of lying about what was traded and how it went down, in order to "help out" the other party?

Surely this could be just as easily abused?

I hear where you're coming from, but it's impossible to avoid risk altogether, and hard to reliably quantify it and/or prevent abuse by users when the trades are one-to-one transactions between individual users, rather than being centrally coordinated.

At least the current system has the capacity to raise warning flags about certain errant users, and conversely, if the user has traded reliably in the past with "known" higher profile users whose feedback you may be inclined to trust, you can at least be relatively hopeful that they will do the same with you.