Thanks for bringing this up. As I wrote above, trust levels aren’t going anywhere and the trust level system is important. It provides sane defaults that any community can be happy with, and Trust levels actually are special. You cannot delete trust level groups, and there are settings that allow you to tweak how your members move between trust levels.
But if you need more flexibility in terms of the privileges you give people in your community you can now specify additional groups for many of settings that you create and manage. This way you have even more granular control.
It’s true that now that we have moved so many of these settings to this new approach the “Trust Levels” category of the admin settings feels a little weird, because you can now remove trust level groups from many of the settings in there. See screenshot below for what I mean.
We’re working on improving the structure/organization of the admin section as well, so will take this into account.
