I think that if someone like David Mayo had taken charge, then Scientology could have been a force for good, regardless of whether OTs are being made. If they had gotten rid of the extreme emphasis on money and made it reasonably priced, gotten rid of the vulture culture, and just made the organisation more ***honest*** and more like a supportive religion, rather than a parasitic organisation, then it could have been a good thing to belong to.How many here think they would still be in Scientology if Broeker had assumed command? How many think the tech would be working and creating clears and OT's in abundance?
How many people joined a yoga or tai chi class, and then bitched and moaned about how terrible it was years later? I suspect most people who did a meditation class, or yoga or some such thing, where the cost was reasonable, people were nice, and the atmosphere was positive, still have good things to say about it, even if they are no longer practising it. Scientology COULD HAVE been like that.
I joined the mormons for a while after Scientology. It was just an experiment. I didn't believe in their teachings, but just wanted to see how another religion well-known for being aggressive in recruitment dealt with people. I wanted to observe the process. I found my local mormon church to be very caring, supportive of families, and came away with a warm feeling towards them. I'm not trying to promote the mormons - I know that some people have similarly terrible stories about being a mormon (I suspect that the nearer you get to Utah, the worse are the stories, which I suppose is the analogue of getting nearer to Flag in Scientology). But the experience I had, in a local mormon church continents away from Utah was much more positive than Scientology, despite them having, really, nothing in the way of 'tech'. It was at least configured in a way that made it viable to spend a lifetime in mormonism. They WANTED you to get educated and get a good career. It benefitted them as well as you (through tithing). So it struck me as a much better 'business model' for a religion than Scientology, which just wants to pick you clean in the minimum time-interval possible, and then kick you out when you complain too much.
Scientology has many more tools than a religion like mormonism. So I think that such a version of the church could have been a good thing. I know that some will say that's not possible, since disconnection etc are hard-wired into the tech. I don't take issue with that. But I think a version of the church could have been designed that just focused on auditing people, and training them to audit each other. That took Ron at his word when he said "ethics is a personal thing", and just gave people the tools to 'get their ethics in' without trying to manage or dictate how they did that. On the other hand, isn't that what Ron's Org is, and yet I don't feel any great pull to become a member of that. But then maybe that's because I was promised the state of OT in Scientology - they over-sold themselves, offering states they couldn't deliver, and thereby wrecked the whole subject.
So to answer your question: if Scientology had been the 'friendly' thing that I have delineated above, none of the obsessive stuff about 'the CIA are trying to get us, and the psychs are trying to do us in', then I probably would have stayed for a lot longer. Would the tech be creating Clears and OTs in abundance? No. But it might be helping people to gain clarity in their lives about their life's purpose, and allowing them to unburden themselves of upsets and moral faux pas that they had committed.