I've been using it since the early days and ran relays and exits. It's good for anonymity against your ISP, advertisers and lesser adversaries than being targeted by TLAs. Can be a bit slow. Make sure to use encryption to protect against bad exit nodes.
Quick question: How does one set up encryption while using the Tor browser for things like searches and regular browsing (research, etc)? Would be useful to know. Appreciate.
You just use https. There are extensions like HTTPSEverywhere, but they potentially add bits to your fingerprint. DuckDuckGo also offers their search interface as a hidden service, perhaps worth bookmarking.