I always feel that we are highly inclined to promote a voting system which would help the side we support.
On a straight popular vote basis, the large urban centers in a handful of states would select the president. Their interests and motivations will necessarily be different from rural areas.
The electoral college gives populous states proportionally more influence, as they have more congressional representatives and thus more electoral votes. But it serves to balance that against the interests of less populated states, which are also part of the country and should not be considered completely irrelevant in the process.
Hell it's the same way in parliamentary systems.
This is a feature of any indirect vote.
The reality is that different locations have different ways of life and culture and politics, and therefore self determination must be supported through some mechanisms (like the electoral college) for a federal union to make sense and for those peoples to feel represented. If we are undoing that we need to also give states the option to secede and go their own way, since this union would simply mean the end of their way of life.
We have entirely different goals now. We should be aiming for fair elections in which one person's vote is equal to any other's regardless of the state they reside. The electoral college is downright repulsive once you realize how unfairly it treats citizens in more populated states compared to those in less populated states.
The electoral college now has the potential of pulling the union apart. If California and New York see a few more elections in which their citizens' votes are discounted, resulting in popular vote winners losing the presidency, then it would be logical for them to secede. They can take their massive economies and accompanying tax dollars and leave this system behind, as it should've been a long time ago.