alt Hacker NewsFederal and most state civil courts are pay-to-win, too. They have absolutely nothing to do with justice. The only time "the little guy" wins anything is when the lawyers stand to make a windfall in contingency fees.
(...See, e.g., authors vs. Anthropic. The most prolific author might make somewhere in the low six figures, the average author is gonna make ~$10k, and the lawyers representing the class asked for $300M!)
The legal system is captured by legal professionals. The average American is bound by a system that they can't engage directly with. The middlemen who most people must hire to navigate through it generally will not help unless there's a substantial payday in it for them. And in civil matters, defendants have no right to representation.
(Also, the judge is colleagues with counsel, opposing or otherwise; none of them think much of you, which a trip to /r/LawyerTalk will confirm.)
All of this is a choice. Essentially the same choice that we have to have medical insurers instead of a single-payer system; a broken housing market controlled by large corporate interests, instead of one where prices are moderated by a stock of residences built by the government and sold at-cost or lower, as in Singapore or pre-Thatcher Great Britain; broken and spread-thin policing instead of the kind of sophisticated social support system that you would expect the richest country on the planet to be able to afford (and avoids sending the same armed ex-jock to domestic disturbances, mental health crises, car accidents, public school security, etc.). My suspicion is that the fight against change in any of these cases is so fierce because breaking one cartel threatens the others.