Hey there, Trocador.app team here.
First of all, we fully get OP's concern about Cloudflare, and it would be very hard for us to argue against the gist of their argument. There's a good reason we don't have Cloudflare as part of our standard operations. However, that means we must implement our own defences against such attacks. We are fine with that. After all, that's enough most of the time. As anyone running a web service in our community knows, we've all been increasingly targeted with DDoS attacks. Here at Trocador, we've had our fair share of them over the last few months, and we've been managing well in our estimate, given our team size. However, last week's incident was something different. We were faced with the option of keeping the service down, or temporarily switching to Cloudflare in an attempt to keep the services running while we hardened our infrastructure. The switch was successful in mitigating the attack's effects, and we kept the platform up. We are aware this is far from ideal to a significant share of our users. That is why we did our best to keep our Tor service operational throughout the attack. Ideally we would have implemented a message on our main page so our users are aware, but most of our team has been busy with Monerokon the past few days. Perhaps that's why the attack was initiated in the lead-up to the event. But who knows... lesson learned!
Our aim is to switch back to normal operation as soon as the attack is over. Unfortunately this attack seems to be much more targeted than previous ones, and has been going on for many days already.
The Monero community has been great as always, and some very competent individuals have reached out to offer guidance and assistance. We're currently working on improving our defences, and we'll be off Cloudflare again very soon, probably in the next couple of days if our strategy works. We were expecting to leave CF today, which would have been only 6 days total using them, but this also depends on our team managing to solve all issues before that, and again, most of our staff is on Monerokon.