Yeah those are the two big ones in China. I used Astril for many years until it went flakey then tried many others, ending up with ExpressVPN (also not cheap). If I were running the CCP Great Wall project I guess I would have the teams concentrate on the most used vpn services, so the trick is to find a good yet under-appreciated one. I often wonder what the top officials here use because hey, they don’t want to be locked out of YouTube!
As for DNS, haven’t done it yet. I briefly looked into it but I’m going to get some help with it first. (wow, forgot to hit reply on this the other day)