I think that democracy itself may be the issue here. Think about the average person, someone you know who is just average, not especially anything. Now think for a moment that half of people are less informed, less intelligent, less rational, and so on. Obviously not all at once, but all people fall on the bell curve of population statistics.

Now think about whatever it is you know a lot about. For me it's science and technology. I know a fair bit about economics as well, but as a lay person, so I would never consider myself an expert there, and I wouldn't even consider myself an expert in tech even though I have been in the industry for about 8 years.

Have you ever listened to the news on a topic you know something about? I have heard them talking about anonymous and hacking, using phrases like '100 megabit per second' or 'using the tweeters'. This is stuff targeted at the average person and below. This is the level they are targeting and you are expecting to vote.

Do you think that someone who has trouble understanding the difference between the country of Zimbabwe and the continent of Africa should be voting on legislation about GMOs? Should they be making decisions about medicine? Or the economy?

Perhaps what we need is a group of experts on the issue, say doctors for medicine, to think about the issues and create policy. They could consult with the economists and other teams to make the solutions work as well as possible, taking in to account cost and capabilities. But this is sounding less and less like a democracy and more like a dictatorship split between a ruling intellectual elite.

So yeah, a representative democracy makes sense when you have a large distance and therefore delay between need for a decision and reply from the people, but today it could be done from an ATM with any account card like a bank or drivers license and as such you could have a direct democracy, but it may make more sense to remove as many vote requirements from people by delegating to bodies of experts what can be done first and then letting the people set the general direction rather than decide specific policy.