I can see you have put some thought into this piece. Because this deserves at least some insight from those of us who might have a glimmer, I'll share some of my personal inspection.
The CofS uses a public personna created back at a time when it was agreed upon that it is a religion. In keeping with that theme, they must pour volumes of records AT the IRS routinely to prove this premise.
This serves many purposes, one of which is that the Management level can claim that the staff are volunteers, working toward a spiritual goal and justify the excuse of payment to these poor souls as a stipend, base pay shared equally by all or based on performance only. (If I explain how that shakes out to those who actually walk up to the window to collect a few dollars - it would take more time and energy than the topic deserves). For example: working a regular 60 hour week, with a classification as a trained auditor and a clear there are weeks when I recieved as little as $9.00 in pay. Probably around the period of 1989.
In have no expierence in the Sea Org so I can not comment.
When joining the Organization I had several years of business management under my belt and had won awards in my field for budget control, payroll managment and sales records. The longer I worked within the structure of the Church, the more I realized how often the very policy of Administration that is set-up for each Church to follow, is routinely and with abandon violated or not used. Rather, direct orders into the Org would be sent down from higher levels to the current Flag Banking Officer to set certain allocations aside for payments to the higher Orgs. Usually these were Publications Org, Author Services, and various 'New" programs as they would come up.
The task of the local planning group, usually the Adminsitrative Council along with the Treasury Secretary would then have to figure out from the balance that remained, how to pay the basic expenses. I mean really basic stuff; lights, water, mortgage, taxes. Oh so many times we operated without lights or the water would be cut off and so on. Most of the time the staff pay would be a very last consideration when those emergencies had to be handled first hand.
So - NO - I don't think anyone was in it for the pay. Our first carrot that was dangled was the promise of our OT levels if we got our stats to Saint Hill size and the Birthday Game became the goal. Its hard to believe the lengths that people would go to in order to accomplish this most unreachable target.
This new target of the Ideal Orgs reveals more about DM than I'm sure he realizes. A bright shiny Org is for PR purposes only. Again the staff must have something other than what a regular business has to keep them producing.
In business, you have to pay people what they are worth or you lose them. In this group the crazy Ethics policies can be manipulated to convince them they are not worth getting paid because of a dip in there production. Yet the admin policy calls for investigation into the area to see if promo went out or if people missed work or if someone untrained came into the area- many, many things that could be used as tools to fix it. Unfortunately, the jump to ethics was most usually made and those hard working staff were led to believe that it was their own fault and introverted them to believe that is the reason they would not be getting adequate payment.
So they stayed and they worked hard and they scraped together rent & food and would go forward with the purpose to do better and figure out what they
did wrong.
So Student of Trinity - I hope I helped to shed some light and of course defer to all my fellows who did their duty and had their own reasons for staying even if they didn't know the story I told today.