It's not an account of value (although some people certainly use it as a proxy for that). What it measures is how many additional games an arbitrary team would expect to win if the player in question were to join that team. This is a very difficult thing to measure. You need to know, among other things, how many runs a single/double/triple/HR can be expected to produce on average, how a player's park affects his ability to hit singles/doubles/etc, how many runs prevented/saved it takes to win an additional ball game (on average), how a team's defense shapes a pitcher's ability to record outs, how many runs are prevented by each out recorded (on average), and on and on.
B-R and Fangraphs have different WARs because they disagree about the best ways to measure some of these things. This is common in an on-going scientific investigation. Measuring things can be hard. And this is especially hard because we can't move players around from team to team to see how their records change - the best we can do is see how the various things that players do (hit singles, catch pop flies, strike batters out, etc) have correlated (historically) with run production/prevention. It's not that the dispute between B-R and Fangraphs is "just a matter of opinion", they have different hypotheses about how best to measure a player's effect on a team's record.
The hall of fame did a good job with Trammell. Historically they have overlooked players like him, either completely (as in the case of Grich) or it has taken them a long time to recognize their greatness (as in the case of Ron Santo). If you want to be a deserving player who doesn't get recognized by the hall of fame, a good way to do it is to be good at everything and great at nothing. We'll see Chase Utley does in a few years.
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