The extant solution for anonymous networks (Tor) requires extra steps that many users won't do, many of those who do will get wrong, and many of those who get wrong won't be aware that they've got wrong.  It is subject to attacks where the compromises of a few selected machines outside your control (your route and exit nodes) can cause your privacy to be sacrificed even if every other node in the mix is honest.  And it is subject to traffic rerouting in transit on the backbone, which is known to be done by at least one sophisticated attacker specifically in response to the fact that it is Tor traffic in the first place. That attacker, and presumably others, specifically reroutes Tor traffic through attack sites which use browser flaws to compromise the machines that originate the traffic.

Tor was a good design once; but the attacks on it are in place, sophisticated, only getting worse, and not easily detectable from the originating node.  So I think that its usefulness is closer to its end than to its beginning.  While Tor may still be good more than 90% of the time, I'm not willing to trust it in the long run. Nor am I willing to trust that people using it can keep their machines from getting compromised by reroutes to attack sites which are using zero-day exploits against their browsers.  Most of them don't even fully disable scripts and cookies in their Tor browser sessions.

The dc-net solution requires you to trust only that there exists at least one other node (ANY participating node) that is not compromised; that's a strictly stronger guarantee than Tor.  If it's built into the protocol then it involves no steps that many users will not do, nor steps that users will attempt but do wrongly.  It is not dependent on the security of machines other than those directly participating, and does not expose machines to attack via a browser as Tor in normal use generally does.

Further, its guarantees are orthogonal to those provided by a (properly functioning) Tor network;  With Tor alone, (if the critical path machines and your own remain uncompromised) you can't associate nodes with IP addresses, but if you're sniffing packet traffic you can associate inputs and outputs with particular nodes.  With the DC-net alone, you can't associate inputs or outputs with particular nodes, but if you're sniffing packet traffic you can produce a list of the IP addresses of the nodes.   So I claim the proper solution is to implement the DC-net as the "fundamental" basis of the protocol, and then let people use it over Tor if they want the extra layer of obfuscation and can correctly use Tor.   That way, even if they fail at configuring Tor, or get unlucky with their Tor network routing, or fail in keeping their own machines secure while using Tor, they still have some fundamental amount of protection.  And if they use Tor correctly, they get additional protection that the DC-net alone could not provide.