Well, what's interesting about the ccTLDs is that their "meaning" was purely organizational, but very clear-cut - you could trust that .us was under the ultimate authority of the US government, and that .ly was under Libyan control, no matter how ridiculous their policy for granting those domains was.
But yeah, I think bit.ly and friends really messed up a lot of the logic people expected from the DNS.
I guess I'm confused, isn't .ly a pretty good example of top level domains losing all meaning? bit.ly has nothing to do with Libya, for instance.