"TrustedCoin previously supported paying on a per-transaction (as opposed to batch) basis but had to discontinue support for this due to mining fees."
Essentially, the high mining fees were making the small per transaction charges into unspendable "dust". Any fee above 67.5 sats/byte makes a 10,000 sat UTXO worthless as it would cost more to include it in a transaction than it is actually worth! (148 bytes * 67.5 sats/byte = 9990 sats)
The system is adding value... As it provides a 2FA service that prevents anyone from sending your coins, but at the same time does not lock you in and prevent you from getting coins out should you lose your 2FA device or TrustedCoin's service goes offline.
And it isn't adding any insecurity. The only have 1 private key in a 2-of-3 MultiSig setup... Even if they got hacked, your wallet is still safe. They cannot modify the transaction in any way (ie. to change the addresses or amounts being sent as the transaction has already been partially signed by your key and any modifications will render the transaction invalid).
They are leveraging a free system provided by Google... As do a lot of commerical services. They also have costs (servers, domains, bandwidth) like most commercial services which need to be covered.
You cannot blame Electrum and/or TrustedCoin because you didn't take the time to read and understand the information being given to you during wallet creation.