From what I've gathered, TOR is pretty robust at least on paper, and when explained in an academic way it has me almost convinced that the apparatus does what i

From what I've gathered, TOR is pretty robust at least on paper, and when explained in an academic way it has me almost convinced that the apparatus does what its supposed to, except for the part where it catastrophically fails when put into practice, like when: 1.) Custom Firefox 'Browser Bundles' which do not auto-update and ensure latent vulnerabilities are left un-addressed 2.) Trusted 'Third Parties' running exit nodes who we hope and pray are doing their job correctly 3.) Weird and non-innocuous looking domains on the wire that do nothing more than alert the neighborhood that somebody's using TOR (Unless everyone's using it you stand out like a sore thumb) 4.) Sybil attacks in the form of people-with-more-money-than-you polluting the network 5.) ??? 6.) Any number of other issues (which have since been patched in the past), but still work if the TOR user is uneducated about how TOR works (traffic analysis / correlation attacks / zero-knowledge-proof attacks, etc)