@bub I’ve been contemplating what you wrote today and I have to say there is something there, I have been trying to put my finger on it. Your bashing of the state of the forum reminded me of some things that @Srinath has brought up recently too, around the time of the global warming discussion.
The fact is that for a few years no-one has managed to become actually free, there are guys who have been into this for 10 or more years and they are still neither actually free nor able to apply the method each moment again. This includes me, I first came across actual freedom when I was 18, then I had some time off but for the last 4 or so years it has been a dedication of mine and still no cigar, both in terms of actual freedom and in terms of feeling good each moment again.
I really don’t think it is for lack of trying either, and there is only so many times someone can link you to the HAIETMOBA article and advise to read it again. Richard was able to devise a method to get there and he was able to use it to become actually free but the replicability of the method has been extremely low so far. Sure you can say that maybe they didn’t sincerely want it etc but when so many people try and fail where do you point the finger?
Where you write that Srinath is looking at other methods (I don’t know the extent to which this is accurate) I am not shocked or upset by this, at the end of the day we are all here for a reason and it seems it is not working. The problem is that actual freedom is such a recent development that the numbers are very low, essentially we are following a method that was devised by a single person and which has since been successfully replicated by a very low number of people.
With such low numbers and such low replicability how can we have confidence that the current method is the most successful (in allowing others to become free)? The fact is that it has worked for Richard and also a handful of other people, but it is also a fact that many more people have tried since and failed miserably.
Which leads to what you mention about it being cult-like. I am starting to see the danger of this in myself, of the actualist identity, of lacking originality.
This is all kind of hazy at the moment still but there is something there. Like we are putting the horse before the cart, with the method becoming just another layer that has been assimilated into the identity. But it seems that there has to be something much more original in the individual to go all the way.
I had this thought today that kind of summarises what I am trying to convey (very poorly 
) :
I thought to myself that it would be the best possible outcome if being an actualist, the actual freedom trust and the rest of it some day soon fades into some obscure corner of history, of ‘what once was’. Why? Because the human condition has been eradicated, people live in actual peace and harmony and now what is the actual freedom method? Merely something that had to be devised to end sorrow and malice.
The goal was never to be an actualist.