If you arbitrarily define any large wire on a pole as being "centralized", then sure, but I wouldn't agree with that definition. For example, I can lease long distance point to point dark fiber for my personal use, and run whatever combination of wavelengths and protocols that I want on it.
In the case where there is only one link between two towns, then the owner(s) of the switches at either end of that link will be able to charge a monopoly price for the bits that get sent across it. Market forces will soon encourage others to create additional links between the two towns.
In the bootstrapping phase of my plan, the case of a single link between two cities would be impossible: Network participants would create tunnels through the IP Internet (with the obvious downside of higher latency and cost).
Back to my original question: Should I be spending my time on this? You claimed that crypto was a better route because mesh doesn't scale. I'm not a crypto genius, but I do consider myself a reasonably proficient systems software engineer. I feel that if I could design a scaleable mesh network protocol stack, many of the problems we're discussing become tractable. What do you think?