(Back) to the op: when I was exiting the WT (mentally first) this was a very painful question to me.
I had a somewhat similar episode -- although less dramatic than many -- in my own story: when I was about 12, in a Catholic boarding school, and hating it passionately (perhaps more because of the family situation that brought me there than the religion per se) I remember praying to God along the line: "If you want me to follow this (the Catholic way), I will; but if there is something else you want me to do, please show me." I didn't know my father and stepmother had already started studying with JWs.
And now (14 years later) I was in Bethel, reading the NT as if for the first time, and steadily drifting away from the JW religion, heading to "apostasy" sooner or later. I my own half-conscious "reading," "God" had brought me to the JWs and now was leading me away.
I had resigned from Bethel but the brother in charge of translation dept. asked me to stay a few months more because of urgent work. I agreed (mostly for him). That was the time of the year when next year's (1986) Yearbook had to be translated within a few weeks. So I found myself translating story after story of people "led" to the organisation, through difficult decisions in hardships and persecution (I had taken the part about Portugal, as I was in a Portuguese congregation then). And I remember the pain was unbearable. Often I had to stop, lock myself in the dark and pray: "I don't understand." At that point I could not really put "fake," "the devil" or "coincidence" into the equation. Nor question my own current path -- just too subjectively obvious. So I had to accept that "God" was actually "leading" people in completely opposite directions at the same time. The scriptures that came to my mind at this point were the reply of Jesus to Peter asking about the beloved disciple in John 21 (in sum): "none of your business -- you follow me" -- or the pericope about the "free-lance exorcist" in Mark 9.
My perspective has evolved since, of course, but I still believe it was a very important "spiritual" experience because it helped me to beware about the abuse of binary logic in theology and elsewhere. The kind of logic which underlies your proposition # 1: "God sent them and I was wrong to leave."