It's the traffic management that adds hops, which in turn adds latency.
No it isn't. Traffic management is done in one box, usually at the ingress point to the ISP network. It does not add hops, it might add latency if your ISP is oversubscribing however that's absolutely nothing to do with the latency in the FTTC case. It's because you're still using a xDSL last mile (even if it's 100m, whatever, the term still stands technically) and still piping everything through a tunnel to ISP rather than pure routing to the internet.
The idea that it's traffic management causing the additional latency is simply wrong, it's just the architecture, which isn't perfect but by BT standard it's not bad.
EDIT:
I'd add, I have a link to Edinburgh here which is through 4 hops, the slowest component link of that path is the cable into my laptop at 1GigE, I see 2ms in use and it's not like it's a heavily loaded link. That they get below 10ms on any kind of home connection is pretty decent going to be honest (not to mention anything below that is irrelevant anyway...).
