It's an incredibly depressing religion. The premise is basically get off the wheel(of samsara) and exist or cease existing in Nirvana and or keep suffering.
The depression is assuming life has the lasting qualities we're seeking and continuing to be disappointed until we are crippled. People try and put that on Buddhism because they refuse to see it. The Buddha was actually offering an incredibly hopeful message: see this mass of aggregate sensations for what it is and be liberated, be truly happy without dependence on conditions, without dependence on the world to offer you anything.
All it takes is to see people, interacted with people who are living examples of this, paragons of whatever is furthest away from this "depression" you ascribe to Buddhism. They walk around with huge smiles on their face. Every interaction with them is pure love, pure compassion. They do not have bad days and here they are with nothing more than a robe and a bowl to their name.
May all people know real kindness, real happiness. I'll tell you here and now, what Sasha is peddling is not it. I strongly condemn what Sasha is offering and other teachers who assume the mantle of power for their own egos. He has abused his position of authority to distort the message of the Buddha, to bring confusion to the path and has brought confusion to his own life that is disharmonious, a life of more attachment not less, a life of imbalance not balance and he is passing out this message to anyone who will listen. This is very bad practice, very bad ethics, because he condemns not only himself, he condemns anyone who buys into his poison.
What do you consider the paragon of Buddhist practice? Maybe I can check them out online. I've hung around DhO and people complain that Buddhist practitioners have more of an emptiness dryness aspect to them as opposed to lively joyous qualities of other traditions like Advaita. I'm not impressed with Zen masters. They espouse very dry rigorous qualities and they don't appear to me carelessly joyous and happy.
You can if you're doing a "no true Buddhist" argument.
Those people wouldn’t for one second judge a person who wanted to practice a “less advanced” form of Buddhism. It’s all about what the person is ready for, according to them.
So anyways the vajryana is the racecar. The point of that metaphor wasn't to flesh out which schools corresponded to a sedan or anything, but more like to point out how few people drive racecars, how few tasks or challenges are well solved by racecars, how much training, respect, and caution you might want to have before you started driving racecars at full speed, the conditions under which you would consider driving a racecar, etc. etc. And like you said, there's no judgement for not driving a racecar -- if anything there's a lot of respect and/or demand for people to drive more practical vehicles.
tho idk, personally, even though in my material life I prefer a bicycle, in my spiritual life I'm still trying to train to drive the racecar, so maybe it needs an even less sexy anology.
Personally, I don't think there is a paragon of Buddhist practice. If you're looking for one I think you might be doing it wrong, so to speak. All three yanas have great teachers, just use your discernment as you follow your path.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B9%ACh%C4%81nissaro_Bhikkh...
As a fraction of worldwide Buddhism, using a low end estimate of 488 million, that's about 1.3 percent.
So, by analogy, if you're looking for a Christian denomination that's about that size proportionally within the larger religion of Christianity: think of the Amish, the Mennonites, etc. (distinctive because of their dress). Numerically that's a close comparison. Maybe throw in the Quakers too. All together that's about the same size, fractionally.
The point is that, when you're dealing with such a small & unique subgroup, you run the risk of misunderstanding the larger group. You might have complaints about the Amish & the Quakers, but as a subgroup they are so small & unique that it seems a little off to use them as a proxy to criticize Christianity. I would suggest the same is true of Tibetan Buddhism as compared to Buddhism globally.