"Well, doesn't that just blow the whole game out of the water?" Not entirely, because it's almost trivial to enhance the Node so that it uses only one relay (to keep costs down), but it adds garbage items to the end of the instruction list before it sends the CORES package. Of course, if a list item isn't intended for you, you can't tell whether it's garbage or not. So that would produce a list of instructions that looked like a long, slow, expensive route, when in reality it was a short, fast, cheap one.