that was a response not a stand alone statement.
I know, and my comment was on the narrative of "truth seekers" in general. I probably should have articulated my issue better.
From what I have seen there are 3 primary ways someone goes OTD. The first is trauma of varying degrees. The second is getting involved with bad friends (also varying degrees). The third are those who drift off. A 4th option is that the theology led them them to the feel that one belief set is more valid than the other. This 4th option can only be through a quest of trying to research the truth and finding it to be different than what he originally assumed. This is rare if ever. You seem to be primarily dealing with the 3rd group. These are people who for various reasons never felt a real connection to Judaism in theology or practice. They don't really have a firm belief in what is true or untrue, but were not incentivised to keep to the many restrictions of religion and just floated away from it. This isn't due to theology but rather due to a void of it. I guess some may get influenced by some other religion or go to India to find meaning or the like, but that is a second step to their general lack of connection. Such cases are definitely a shortcoming in their upbringing.
Without going too much further down this rabbit hole, I believe that very rarely is it only one of the 4 categories you describe. It's most often combinations of two, three, or even all 4 reasons, and likely a few more that weren't mentioned. This is what I've been trying to clarify with my posts. When you're diagnosing people who went OTD as a post mortem, trying to figure out how they got to where they are, pointing to a single cause is usually wrong and almost always unproductive. When trying to analyze why many of them point to theological issues, when we know that there are very, very few cases of people leaving for purely theological reasons, we have to acknowledge that reasons 1, 2, or 3 all lead to theological questions, and if the answers aren't forthcoming or are unsatisfactory (for whatever reason), theology becomes "the" reason. It's important to understand that when an OTD person says this, they truly do mean it and they may not be lying. I may have had trauma, or hung out with a bad crowd, or just slipped, but if my questions had been answered before I completely jumped shipped, it's very possible my course would have been altered.
Many people have expressed being given a feeling of not being allowed to ask. I cannot speak to that because I did not experience it. No matter which yeshiva I was in, I was encouraged to ask questions and search for answers. For the vast majority of them I found the answers. this led me to feeling that if I do not have an answer to a specific question it is more likely due to my lack of understanding than anything else.
I can't speak to your experiences - I don't know what questions you asked, who you asked them to, or what answers were given - but BH it worked out well for you. I'm trying not to be presumptuous, but if your questions were asked from a purely academic perspective, without a background of discontent or challenges with the frum way of life, it's possible that the questions you asked were different, and/or that your bar for satisfaction in those answers may have been lower.