When I first left the JW's some years ago, one of the most incredible observations I made was just how irrelevant the WT and JW's were to the larger public. When the conversation turned to my history (as it often did, because I desperately wanted to discuss it) the most comon reaction was of complete unawareness of the JW's, much less their doctrine, or complete surprise that I regarded them as destructive. To the later, the JW's were understood to be just another church like any other, a little weird perhaps but just one of the many churches in town. It was a huge step forward in my adjustment to the larger world to realize that they were right, it was just a church like so many others.
I am of the opinion that the greatest damage to the WT was when it outlasted it's sensational predictions and outgrew gigantic conventions and became an Adventist, Protestant church like dozens of others. The misleading PR campaigns to impress governments eventually shaped the new reality. The complete makeover of the Kingdom Halls and the image conscious emphasis upon having respectable cars and homes and "reasonable" incomes and insurance so as to project the impression of normalacy have been taken to heart and with each year the religion has evolved further from inflamatory, raging doomsayers toward unremarkable, unexceptional, unnoteworthy, irrelevant.