It's been really obvious to me since 2007, that in order to scale, an onion routing network needs to pay its routers. This is why I'm building Indra. You can find me on old Tor mailing list talking about the crappiness of Tor for SSH and IRC as well, just search for "vennik". I have got some basic sponsorship to work on this full time and hopefully spiral.xyz will come through with some more.