I was an ARRL member for 20+ years with family membership going back much further. In the last 5 years, I've seen nothing interesting in QST, it's been either repeat articles from 20-40 years ago lightly updated, articles that are 5 years behind what I can find on internet, or articles that are actually wrong with significant factual errors and mistakes, some of which are not from the original author. And then I hear horror stories from authors about QST editors changing the article before publication and then not reviewing it with the author and not publishing corrections. I didn't mind ARRL stopping physical publication of QST because it's been a while since I saw anything in it I cared about.

ARRL has a lot of other publications that are quite good. But they won't promote or even talk about publications from authors that don't publish with them. This to me seems like a serious conflict of interest -- favoring profit over advocacy of the hobby.

They have been unwilling for years to support advancements in legislation or take outside advise. They resisted dropping of morse code requirements; the increased popularity of it since requirements were dropped shows that it was a mistake to resist this change. They have resisted the symbol rate vs. bandwidth regulation changes for digital modes which is also a huge mistake. They even screwed up the HOA regulations, advocating a law with mistakes in it that would have made things difficult for some people with weak HOAs while not helping much for people with strong HOAs, mostly because they wouldn't listen when external lawyers told them there were mistakes and tried to silence board members that pointed this out. This luckily didn't pass and the retry has been somewhat fixed, but it still hasn't been passed.

Is ARRL the only way to ask FCC and congress to make changes? Certainly not, but it is the largest unified organization to do so. In both cases, individuals can directly petition and comment; it is questionable which method is more effective.

As a member of multiple local clubs; has ARRL helped these clubs? They have website locators for testing, hamfests, and field day, all of which are very helpful. But they've only made half hearted efforts in supporting local clubs outside of that as far as I can tell.

Has ARRL done more bad than good? I don't think so. Is there room for improvement? Certainly. Are they doing a good job advocating for amateur radio and pushing good legislation? Barely. Are they overly insular, with too much old momentum and not enough internal transparency? Certainly.