One year is arguably not long enough to assess a magical system, let alone encourage others to take it up.
My own experience involved nearly two decades in the original ONA and the Temple of Set (cumulatively, over three decades of experience in many different roles across both organisations). The more experience/titles I accumulated, the more I learned to advise the most promising initiates to approach
any order with caution. I'm not alone in this - many leaders of serious orders advise the same.
As a general rule, it was the middling initiates that most needed an order (which is not to say a "school" - that's a different thing). The least promising were always going to jump from one fad/neurosis to another, while the most promising initiates already had some sense of what magical currents were working within them. These initiates could be guided into understanding that those currents would play out across the course of their life and that that process cannot be replicated or even amplified by joining an order (though the wrong order might rob of them of time and energy). The middling initiates, those who maybe understood that something was going on with them but didn't really know what, were always most suited to an order. The high risk with those in the middle was that they would often internalise maps and mistake them for territories.
This isn't to slight Dragon Rouge. It's been around a good while now (always a positive sign for a magical order) and Karlsson is well respected. However...
But you might get lucky and figure it all out on your own without the help of others. So there's that too. Myself, I'm too old to do things the wrong way until I figure it out.
They're not doing a good job of teaching you not to project your own frustrations/disappointments onto others. The sarcasm aside, there are in fact people smart enough to "figure it all out on their own". Pythagoras, the Buddha, Zoroaster, Shams of Tabriz... none of them were card carrying members of anything. They figured it out for themselves. Those with the self-discipline and intelligence (the former can only be recommended by an order, no order can do anything about the latter) will not only find a way, that's all they really can do.
