For any system that is put in place, here are the immediate issues I see that would need to be addressed
Upon reading your post it does shed a lot more light onto what I was previously saying by using more tracking, that obviously might not be the best way to help employ more trust.
I have more knowledge on the affiliate (and) merchant side and also have more technical skills then 95% of merchants but do not know a lot about the inner workings of the networks (Except for the software they use).
I would say this is one heck of an issue to satisfy and will take time but I also feel its good to at least be talking about it.
Even if we cannot fully employ added tracking solutions I think by knowing a little more about the merchant themselves will help out a lot, things like what they plan to do with the traffic once they obtain the lead.
We can pretty much guess that already and can determine the course of action the lead would have to take to perform that action by examining the merchants website.
However it almost seems like if mis-trust continues to rise in the coming years, it will have a good size impact on lead gen campaigns.
Sales is so much easier to deal with and as someone who has sold products of my own in the past I look at sales to be the best plan of attack, basically because when a purchase is made all you do is set a percentage of that sale aside to pay the network with and you pocket the rest.
However from an affiliate standpoint sales are harder to achieve then leads but some with some business models leads the only solution from sales.