For what little it's worth, I empathize with Ms. Carreon. Practice can be a frustrating business at times, even within the parameters of a comfortable, simple life; it can be downright devilish to maintain view and discipline when times are tough, or when there is no escape and little comfort - as within a Dharma center or institution. I empathize because I also have lived and worked long and hard and struggled (and often failed) to thrive within the context of a (different) Buddhist institution. Like her, I also chose to leave the institution I lived within, but even though this was not an easy decision, and I had to face a great deal of flak from those who stayed on, the time there seems valuable nonetheless.
It would have been easy to resent the years I spent working longer and harder than I ever thought possible with little time for what I considered practice. Having come to the decision that I needed to leave, it would have been easy to look back at that time as "wasted," to place blame for my dissatisfaction elsewhere, but I really don't think this was the case. I stayed of my own free will; after I felt the first strong urges to leave but did not act on them, I had to accept that something was keeping me there, something in me.
I know several other "refugees" from this community who ended up throwing Buddhism as a whole out of their lives because they associated all of Dharma with their experiences there, and this is one of the saddest things I can imagine. One of the few things sadder that I can imagine would be deciding Dharma needed to be re-cast according to my own sense of comfort and political correctness.
Ms. Carreon is not alone. She is neither alone in her feelings nor, alas, alone in her desire to neuter the Dharma in order to "improve" it according to a set of "Western" ideals. She's not the first human being, much less Westerner, to feel the same way. It's just a neurosis after all to get angry at what is perceived as a loss, or a slight, or a threat. We need look no further than the teaching of the Eight Worldly Dharmas to see that this is an old scenario. We need to keep our efforts - and our dissatisfaction with the results, or apparent lack thereof - in perspective, rather than blame our teachers or the nature of their expression of Dharma. How many other forgotten lifetimes have we - today's practitioners - striven, and failed, to reach the fruit of enlightenment?
What we need to accept - as Buddhists first and foremost, but as human beings in the end - is that there is only one guarantee in our lives: that they will end. Emptiness will happen. That's it. There are no other guarantees or contracts, "stated or implied," as it says in the fine print. But within the time we do have, we also need to accept that the focus on our intended goal, on the results, is our biggest obstacle to realizing those results. The view that time spent in practice, especially Vajrayana practice, can ever be "a bad investment in the realm of faith" misses the point utterly.
Strangely, the salve for Ms. Carreon's conundrum seems to be found within her writing itself, lying unseen like a gem in the grass. She quotes His Holiness the Dala'i Lama as speaking of "the basic instruments that actually transform our mind. These instruments are the altruistic spirit of enlightenment [bodhicitta], the transcendent attitude, renunciation, the realization of impermanence, the wisdom of selflessness." As Vajrayana practitioners our efforts must be grounded in the selfless ideal of the Bodhisattva to succeed. A "What's in it for me?" focus destroys the ground upon which our practice is built.
We cannot but help to carry our cultural and personal neuroses into our practice; how else could it be? So, in some ways it is to be expected that we would arrive at Dharma carrying baggage like "S/he who dies with the most teachings wins." How sad that, once arriving at Dharma's door with them, we can forget to put these heavy bags down entirely.