At what point would you embrace the botnet?

Counter sage

That's all fine doing a toy computer for the sake of education but do you honestly want to use an OS that has less power than an Intel 386 and less features than a DOS machine?

t. nigger who has 0 knowledge about how tor works
See, the first node is also called "Guard node" only chosen randomly on first start, then it persists through all sessions. Why does it do so? Because stable first node statistically lowers the probability of being owned by CIAniggers, das rite. Capisci, my little friend?

First hop VPN on abroad VPS allows you to scramble and obfuscate traffic patterns even further than obfs Tor bridges do it. An OpenVPN tunnel with garbage traffic flowing in both sides is less suspicious than a "private" Tor bridges distributed though bridgedb because said bridges could potentially already be in your IPS/government censorship lists.
Then there's such esoteric arcane things like GoVPN.