About the 'trick' for finding the diameter of an graph in $O(n^2)$
The diameter of the following graph is $2a+4$. If you start from $v$, you will need $i=2a+1$ iterations to have $s,t\in W_{i}$. It provides a family of counter-examples for an arbitrary large number of indirections (as $a \to \infty$).