shadowsocks was the winner of the state of the art I had to do at work. It address the "long-term statistical analysis will often reveal a VPN connection regardless of obfuscation and masking (and this approach can be cheaper to support than DPI by a stat)" comment.
Someone should create a vpn protocol that pretends to be a command and control server exfiltrating US corporate secrets from hacked servers. The traffic pattern should be similar, and god forbid Xi blocks the real exfiltrations