But if all those 486 33's that people have been making nodes out of are:

decrypting 3des,
looking up the packet in there routing tables,
and reencrypting with 3des

then your latency will suck, and your throughput will drop, and it will only take a few hops until the whole network sucks.

node to node encrypted tunnels only help you against wireless intersecption, they don't help you against compramised nodes, or evil/curious node admins.

end2end protects you against *everything*.