Like I said, I would appreciate someone explaining why I’m wrong but I’ve been closely following Tor for years and I haven’t seen anything to refute my opinion.
That's gonna be tough, as the network would be broken if we could show you're wrong. Anonymity means you don't know. I've also been closely following for years and haven't seen anything to support your opinion. I believe most Tor nodes are run by aliens and haven't seen anything to refute it. Not saying you shouldn't be cautious about anonymity, aliens, or whatever, but to tell everyone it's non-anonymous, intergalactic, etc and wait to be convinced by your own standards you're wrong doesn't help the practical user.
Curious though, if a popular non-nefarious app that used Tor were to emerge and communicated only on onion services (i.e. no exit nodes) and most users (i.e. non-mobile) were also relays, do you think that would help reduce the percentage of surveillance relays enough to feel comfortable? Or are there any ways that you could feel comfortable in a popular, anonymous, distributed network environment that most participants weren't surveillers?
Compared to anything else in that space, I always liked how Tor does not promise magic, but is actually pretty open about its weaknesses. Most of what comes up as "new discovery of a weakness" is actually already covered in the original design paper and FAQ.
But what are you going to do? Not use Tor? That's surely worse.
If you use your residential internet connection you're definitely not anonymous.
If you use Tor you're maybe not anonymous. That's still better.