global adversaries "they don't likely exist, or if they do, they're our friends"
Highly capable Global Adversaries are well known to exist. TOP SECRET friends may perhaps be the friends of few, often end up generally corruptive, less than stellar, an uncertainty, etc... thus really shouldn't be kept or created. Seek out better ways.
implementing one of the newer designs seems unlikely. Given that potential volunteers are working on Tor.
That's another problem with large projects, like corporate and government monopolies, they can suck up all the air in the room... needed and valuable diversity, competition, and evolution gets starved out, groupthink herd monoculture etc sets in generations. In the space of critical use case anonymity, privacy, messaging tools, crypto utility application overlay networks, cryptocurrency, etc... a space too new to have enough breadth and depth of research paths dreamed up and exhausted so as to begin to see what works, to advise with confidence, or not... that would not be good at all. Tor... circuit based encrypted onion routing tcp with quasi decentral human roots of authority... is a done architecture model since 20 years, its wholesale novel development research covered in its early whitepapers. Researchers hoping for big architecture breakthroughs against adversaries, should probably investigate other potential and new solutions elsewhere. Even if only filling in currently uncovered use cases, on up to addressing current and expected evolution in adversaries, there is a lot of fun work to do out there beyond Tor. As for Tor, there is much left... tickets, UI, Web, Phone, optimization, obfuscation, their own "community", waging part in the overall pro privacy freedom speech crypto war, all sorts of research, improvements, and publication on how its network architecture is doing in vivo, where it's useful and not, ongoing operations... the long tail of Tor, same as any project. Tor gets so much money some said Tor could throw a bunch of it into an independant overlay competition fund. But since such parent child separation is not achievable, it is the donors who would need to start that up on their own, and the newer diverse projects who can consider accepting it. Like any other project, Tor is great at what it does well, yet those areas are *not* unlimited. This is not Kansas, it's Overlay Land, a land known to be considered for use by those with more critical / different needs than say, simply browsing the web. [Even then...] Tor users should see more disclaimer and fair honest analysis, and less blanket use case superlative coming from Tor. Indeed sad to whatever extent that does not happen.