There's no real sense in which this is the only electoral system we've had.
The electoral college is an order of magnitude smaller than the original constitution would call for. The method by which many states apportion electors has changed since the US's founding. We also count people differently than we used to. Not to mention the 12th amendment.
But the design of the electoral college was to deadlock the states and provide Representatives in the US Congress the final say in the matter. In effect, our country's founders were AGAINST the founding of political parties, in part because they knew it'd break the system that they worked so hard to set up.
Alas, not all plans work out. Our current system is an accident, created in the ignorance / naivete of political parties with little thought or design put into the real operational use.
The only thing that DOES work is that our constitution can (and regularly does) change when everyone is convinced that our rules and regulations are in need of an update. And more and more people are beginning to think that this whole "Electoral College" crap is stupid.
It seems far more likely that we design our system to actually work with Political Parties (instead of being corrupted by Political parties), rather than trying to ban political parties.
Tribalism, Cheerleading, Echo-chambers, "Fake News", Yellow Journalism, Propaganda... these are facts-of-life in America and no amount of legal writing will prevent humans from being humans. We will always separate ourselves into camps during political decisions.
Its a bad thing for our democracy because our system wasn't designed for it. But alternative voting mechanisms or improved systems can allow us to make progress in spite of the corrupting influence of human nature.
What have we learned in the past 250ish years of this country? And what can we do with that knowledge to improve our country? In general, this country learns to harness human nature, instead of trying to defeat it.
When you try and defeat human nature (say: Amendment 18), you are only met with failure.
The optimal method for gaming the system is entirely dependent on the details of the system.
In this case, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting produces a two-party system. No matter how you structure the electoral college, as long as their vote is FPTP/WTA, the two-party system will change every other rule that they can touch to ensure that only those who will vote for the party can ever become electors.
I wouldn't call it the only one we ever had considering a few hundred years ago the electoral college was not elected by direct election (in every state, it was actually up to the states how they wanted to elect the college and the original states predominantly did it differently in the early 19th century) and if we were under the old rules pre-amendment Hillary would be the VP right now.
The electoral college is an order of magnitude smaller than the original constitution would call for. The method by which many states apportion electors has changed since the US's founding. We also count people differently than we used to. Not to mention the 12th amendment.