Do you run those nodes you hop through? Also.. congrats on finding people to communicate with securely-as-possible.
Hopping through my own Tor nodes could be a bit counter-productive, as it would make attribution of my circuit quite a bit easier.
I use an extended hop relay with hand-selected nodes, which allows me to use five hops instead of the standard three, and hand-select fast relays that are in nations which are unlikely to share information readily. There's a few more tricks I use to counter e.g. stream watermarking, but at a certain point you reach diminishing returns, as the browser is only so secure.
If I was running a drug cartel, it'd be appropriate COMSEC, but for me its really more of an experiment than anything else.
So if I no longer live in a country that feels as I do, which I very sincerely doubt, let come what may.
I go beyond the .torrc config settings. I have a custom Python controller that uses Stem[0] to interface with the tor binary's control port to build my paths and circuits.
My tor binary has some customizations as well (stop sending 512 byte cells by default, random packet delays with large transfers, creative TLS and circuit multiplexing), and of course there's the standard use of obfsproxy[1], unlisted bridges[2], etc.
[0]https://stem.torproject.org/