I’m skeptical that you’ve sampled a good cross-section of experiences. It sounds like you exposed yourself to a high volume of anecdotes from a narrow category of respondents. You may also have been exposed to liars or exaggerations; you yourself aren’t lying.

Hopefully that’s stated directly enough for you.

It's your right to be skeptical -- although I can't fathom why. I got nothing better to do, I'm here specifically to mislead you.

Heh, okay.

Again, to be clear, I think you’re misled; you’re communicating sincerely.

As to why any of us are here, fair question!

We all judge by what we see. Obviously that's never the whole truth -- that much has always been true. So I never claimed to have the whole truth of the situation; of course I don't, it would be hugely naive for me to claim otherwise.

My general stance basically is "don't look at what's written, look at what people can do and get away with it because that's exactly what most people will do".