Actually, I’ve found the reserves to consistently have the best leaders I’ve encountered in the Navy.
And the game is pretty simple: everyone makes O-4, pretty much everyone makes O-5, and if you want to do more work for equal pay (command), you have to have some reason to want to do so. I guess that you could do it to pad your resume, but pretty much everyone I’ve seen has done it for the “right” reasons. There’s no pretense; everyone has already quit once and it’s no skin off anyone’s back if you want to do the minimums. The admin processes are awful, but the people are great.
BLAB: the reserves are what I was expecting to find while I was on active duty.
It helps that everyone involved (at least SELRES) has already transitioned to civilian life and been de-institutionalized through that. If you're a successful SELRES, you didn't leave active duty like Brooks, you left it like Andy Dufresne. Like you said, we've already quit or been laid off once.
That has the odd effect of both decreasing some of the overall BS factor, while making the remaining admin pain that much more painful. We stay in because we work with civilians who, God bless 'em, don't quite grok the reward we get from still serving. But we also turn around, look at STG3 Fucknuts at the NOSC dorking up an instruction and just generally phoning it in, and think "good God, my company would be bankrupt if we worked this way . . ."
I stay in for my SELRES Sailors and the little bit I still get to do on AT/ADT every year. I tolerate NOSC reindeer games as best I can. Or at least endure them.