Party affiliation was intended to sort of pre-seperate some basic ideological differences (which they still do) but, I think the rationale for that was so we could fall back to picking a party as opposed to the specific person.
No, parties are a natural power structure whereby people with shared interests pool together their efforts and resources.
There is no way to eliminate parties.
And for those of us concerned with or tired with political shenanigans, I don't see how
more parties would be a solution to that problem.
I feel our system is pretty good. We have to settle for inefficiencies and political gameplay, but like I said, it's part of the deal. We have a system of checks and balances and the parties are no different. It's stable and that's valuable.