Element does not trust my friends's keys

I recently switched from Riot to Element, and while my friends's sessions were marked as trusted in Riot, now they are all marked as untrusted in Element, which means that I cannot send them encrypted messages until I re-do the dance to trust those keys, even tho I already did.

Worse: now I cannot just tell Element to trust the keys, I have to go through an interactive key signing with the other user, which is nigh on impossible with most of my friends since they are rarely connected at the same time as I am (which was the main reason I started using Matrix rather than XMPP).

I'd have expected that all the remote users's keys that were trusted in Riot are still trusted in Element (that information about which correspondant's keys are trusted should presumably be stored on the Matrix server rather than on the client, no?).

I really appreciate the effort to provide strong security, but I think Element would gain a lot by having several levels of security: currently it's either no encryption or encryption with a very painful key distribution scheme. I can see situations where that distribution scheme makes sense, but for mildly private conversations among friends it's way overkill. It's getting to the point where Riot/Matrix/Element becomes a recurring joke among my friends.