It's not even just that. I mean, if Scientology were really doing a good job of ripping off all the good stuff that had been done before, and putting it all together in a convenient system, that would really be worth something. Less than the hype, but still quite something.
But Scientology doesn't even do that. It misses a lot of the best stuff, screws up much of what it does steal, and it throws in a lot of toxic contaminants.
Scientology is not even conveniently packaged, in pedagogical terms. The ideas are not presented clearly and coherently so that one can easily understand them. Hubbard could write a good three-line paragraph, but he seems to have been far too lazy to ever go back and revise anything he had once written, to update his older stuff to bring it into coherence with later ideas. And so a lot of his ideas just morph confusingly into each other, even just between one PL and the next. A lot of Hubbard's individual pages seem quite clear and easy to follow, but his pieces just don't all fit together into one whole, because he never took the trouble to make them fit.
Scientology does seem to deliver on its promise of convenience in one sense, though. It's apparently quite easy to do. You show up, you get routed onto your courses, you do your drills. In dollars, Scientology costs a lot. But in the cost of spiritual labor to discern the right path to follow to improve oneself, Scientology is cheap. The path is clearly taped out. There's no need for any of that agonized seeking and struggling that other religions force you to do.
If you believe that Scientology works, as a brilliantly efficient systemization of Buddhism or something, then in this respect you might say that Scientology is the Model T of religions — enlightenment for the masses. If you're less impressed by Scientology, you'd maybe call it the fake Rolex of religions — a cheap knock-off product that only looks good on the surface and won't really do the job. So in a sense, yeah, the convenient packaging is there. The value of the packaged product is more debatable.
