The basic premise of your argument is that this is the best we can do for now, so that should be acceptable. Not unlike claiming “If you can’t create a painting better than The Mona Lisa yourself, you just have to admit that it’s your favorite painting.”
My mind hasn’t been changed, especially by mere flak that lacks constructive arguments. People may disagree with me freely, but that doesn’t fix the holes I’ve pointed out in existing technology that mesh networks still leave open.
You said that, for example, Tor could do things much better, but you didn't put forth any argument as to why you think that/how that could be done. I am not claiming that it's impossible, I am simply rejecting your unsubstantiated claim, and in particular your unsubstantiated criticism of the Tor project. Also, I strongly suspect that any ideas you have in mind have been considered and rejected by the Tor project for very good reasons ... but you'll have to show your actual ideas before I actually know.
Also, it's a useless argument to posit an end user who is willing to do anything they are told by an untrusted third party as a useful threat model. There is nothing that will protect against that, and that includes established ISPs.
One lesson: Use TLS.
> Is SSL/TLS enough? Probably not for less technical people who can be socially engineered into trusting a malicious root CA because they just want internet.
Is super-secure-network enough? Probably not for less technical people who can be socially engineered into installing malware.
> Is TOR worth anything? Oh, I still feel like it’s pretty laughable that exit nodes operate on an honor system of not snooping on plain-text traffic.
What else would you suggest?
> From where does one summon the mental gymnastics necessary to go along with that?
From where does one summon the mental gymnastics necessary to come up with the idea that it would be Tor's job to prevent you from communicating however you want?