Oh, I'm sorry: because I have been living and breathing this for months, it is very easy for me to assume context :(. Once you connect to the network, you are able to judge the size of the network to know you aren't on a fake network (this is a scenario similar to judging the size of the longest chain of Bitcoin blocks) and you are able to verify signatures of routing table entries (which have been built up as the network was formed by nodes verifying reachability properties of other nodes), which itself is more trustworthy due to proof-of-work and "cryptographic puzzles" which are used to make the cost of sybil and eclipse attacks prohibitively high.

Given that context, you really just need the address of any node, not the address of a particularly "trustworthy" node, so you can get one from a friend's client or from a random website. We have discussed some alternatives, such as being able to put out a bounty on an existing peer-to-peer cryptocurrency blockchain (one which would have to not itself be fully blocked for you, of course). We also have been getting interest from some people in academia who have a number of other techniques, which again are mostly viable because of the background that "what if we can provide enough mitigations in the network itself and use what has been learned from blockchains to mean you don't need to find a trustworthy node".

>The concept of Orchid seems nice but the actual implementation seems very hand-wavy.

Yes that was also my conclusion.