I understand your concern about using TOR over VPNs over the "life or death" scenario.
But basically **% of the people who would use VPN and have to worry for their safety would be using it for communication.
So imagine this scenario:

*) You connect to Kyrgyzstan VPN
2) You create local proxy chain of * servers scattered world wide, like indonesia, albania, bosna
*) You forward all your traffic through them and then establish your open source encryption chat.

How is this not enough to match tor's anonymity level?

vpnarea.com offers all that, locations in kyrgyzstan, malaysia, moldova, south africa, egypt, isle of man and many others, free list of private socks5 proxies with changed ports of access everyday included in membership,
proxy chain manager and even large list of opendns servers.

Regardless of what you think the VPN providers who keep logs and chances of those logs getting into the wrong hands are only the biggest ones like StrongVPN and HideMyAss (who already betrayed their ********s once publicly) and that's because they are originating from countries like UK and USA.