Good take. Some things only work if they're general and open. 

@giacomozucco  has talked a lot about the role of a large enough anonymity set for some privacy tools to work properly. 

I think this is a similar effect. From that point of view, there was no alternative to opening Tor to the public. Makes perfect sense. 

Btw, using hardware wallets instead of standard hardware increases risk for the same reason: it marks you as part of a relevant and smaller subset.