I saw the first few episodes of The Vow and had pretty much the exact same reaction as you. It was clear all along that all of the people involved, those at the top and the victims/recruits, were both very wealthy and also conventionally beautiful. The whole time they're going on about their goal being to help people the world over, even talking specifically (if I remember right) about solving global poverty. But it's a fucking for-profit pyramid scheme and they make no pretense otherwise! I mean, the pretense is that it wasn't a cult, but not that it wasn't a get-even-more-wealthy-quick ponzi scheme. It's one thing to be a fucking misled lib with your "heart in the right place," foolishly thinking the social ills of world can be "fixed" without addressing capitalism... But most of them were already borderline lizard people going in.

So yeah, I completely agree, it made it impossible to have any sympathy for the individuals doing the expose because it seemed clear their agenda was not an altruistic one at any point, despite their constant framing of themselves as pure do-gooders. I wondered the whole time what the show creators were leaving out and felt confident that there was a hell of a lot more going on that would never be presented in this "documentary" series. It also struck me as a haphazard mess as far as the narrative and editing went, making it even harder to follow. So I just stopped even trying to watch it. I didn't know there was another series about it that might actually get into some of those issues, so that's good to know.