Perhaps I should clarify that I am not discouraging the use of VPNs, but I am encouraging more involvement in the policy process. Indirectly, I guess I am encouraging a better understanding about the intricacies of VPN services.
A hybrid approach as you suggest seems agreeable to me.
I believe policy is important as a part of the solution because it is a matter of protecting the general public not just a select technically capable.
Yes, policy is hard and can be useless but I still believe it is an important goal to fight towards.
You can care about your privacy, use a VPN and use the democratic process to enact policy change. Those things need not be mutually exclusive. VPNs are only a part of the solution and incomplete, not the solution.
VPNs will definitely incur overhead and latency costs, yeah.
OpenVPN can be fairly slow if you are sharing CPU usage (ex. VPS provider) with other users. You are also most likely implementing NAT on your VPN server which is probably not accelerated unless you are paying for an expensive appliance that does so.
DNSCrypt + HTTPS everywhere solves the latency issue but it doesn't solve some of the other issues.
You still need the technical know-how to set up a DNSCrypt recursive resolver. The resolver then talks to the respective recursive chain in plain text as DNSCrypt is not something that is widely adopted.
A hybrid approach as you suggest seems agreeable to me.