I share a similar belief. Maybe it's our state that brings out the cynicism.

But I don't understand why this kind of outlook isn't discussed more, the only places I ever see anybody talking about how elections are gamed are statistics sites. The current system is biased towards politicians who build up concentrated bases in specific regions, which naturally means that policies are going to be biased towards the wants and needs of those regions. And in extreme (though unlikely) situations this could be exaggerated, as theoretically a candidate only needs ~25% of the popular vote to win the presidency.

And of course even besides the presidential system the regular first-past-the-post voting system leads to gaming the system in other ways, by filtering out more extreme candidates, as people vote strategically out of fear of a worse candidate being elected. The thing is, there's so many alternative voting systems that could be explored and selected based on the type of election and public preference, but this hasn't really been looked into in-depth in most places.

But candidates with the main parties, even more "fringe" types like Bernie Sanders, seem to shy away from the idea of reforming our voting systems. Maybe because it would be overly ambitious due to the fact that it would require constitutional changes, so they don't see it as politically viable, or maybe because they've already built a strong base within the two party system and they don't want to lose that security. I imagine it's often a mix of these two things, even with Sanders despite the fact that he's technically independent (I'm sure he worked really hard to get that political base that's kept him in Congress), his position could be shaken up if a system was introduced that allowed more diversity in candidates and didn't split up our elections into a dichotomy that quite likely doesn't translate well to an individual's personal political positions.

I don't think we're going to see somebody like Sanders being a real contender for the presidency until we either culturally shift to a much more liberal society, or fix the problems with the manipulable voting system.