What does a VPN do that incresing the number of hops wouldn't do better? And do you have any source for your claims that 50% of Tor nodes are compromised, or that timing attacks are currently present and identifying any Tor users? Also, have you considered the possibility of increasing the default number of Tor hops without relying on onion links? By the way, onion links should not be treated as having 6 hops, since the owner of the onion site knows 3 of the hops and because site owners are treated as malicious in Tor's threat model.

ISP will know that you use Tor if you don't put a VPN in between. VPN's a much more commonly used so it raises less suspicion. Not saying that 50% are compromised. Just saying that > 50% are in just two jurisdictions that make information exchange likely. Recently DNM have been taken out by German police. More hops would be nice, especially since overall Tor speed grew by a big factor in the last 3 years. Need to look into how onion nodes view the network. Which makes me think that i2p is even more necessary than I thought first.