Yes, linking the religious leadership of the inherently strongly hierarchical belief systems with these belief systems sounds very reasonable to me.
I have an impression we agree on the reasoning, just not on the details and the conclusions from these details. At this point we're arguing the semantics of whether the religious people rejecting their religious leadership still belong to the same religion or rather they invented their own religion distinct from the original one. In other words, whether the leadership is an inherent part of their religion.
Do I have that right that apart from the above we're pretty much on the same page?