I'm sure it must be true that many people just fall away, but as you say, unless they do the work of looking at it objectively, they are prone to getting sucked back in.  When you said the following, it was as if you were talking about me as well:

For myself, I wanted to leave a number of times in the late 70s but couldn’t and wouldn’t out of fear for fucking up with God & eternity.  I left the ashram before it finally closed, felt a huge personal relief and wished I had done so earlier.  However, & this was the thing for me, I still believed in Knowledge as the only path and Maharaji as Lord, so would continue practising.  

I can't tell you how many times in say the 1979-1982 period that I almost couldn't stand it anymore, and would have left if I felt it was at all possible.  I just felt so stifled, so out of touch with my humanity, and so unhappy.

But I just felt I couldn't, mostly because I was so indoctrinated in the Rawat fear system that I would either go to hell (or rot like a vegetable), or even more, miss out on being with the messiah of our time.  I was trained to discount or overlook my misery and just stay in.   The belief system was that there was no place else to go.  There was only one Perfect Master, and you only had a one in a gazillion chance to be with him -- so you better not blow it and that there were a million ways to blow it.  You were walking on the razors edge as a devotee of the Perfect Master.  Fear, fear, fear.   

What was the story Rawat used to tell about the guy who got distracted while getting a drink of water and wasted his whole life?   What a rotten, asshole thing to tell people.  These are the things that make me the most angry about Rawat and what he did to us.