I think that was modoc's original point, in response to the 'stella' comment. SSL, even if vulnerable to Sotirov-level impersonation attacks, still protects from other idiot-level attacks.

So you might be tricked into setting up encrypted communication to one of the (small) N groups that have the knowledge/budget to do a Sotirov attack, but at least you still won't have identity details hijacked by (large) M others, because even broken cert-checking protects against them.