It would be great to have a decentralized relay network! Right now this is a centralized bandaid solution, which is unfortunately necessary because of many well-known vulnerabilities of Bitcoin's p2p layer.

E.g.

- Tampering with the Delivery of Blocks and Transactions in Bitcoin https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/578

- Bitcoin over Tor isn't a good idea http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.6079.pdf