I did enjoy the oddball comments from the more eccentric ones.
Oh yes... It was the audience that made a meeting lively, like a music gig really, an appreciative enthused audience is half the show.
I always enjoyed commenting. Simple really, if you are interested then you have something to say about it. As a one time conductor of many WT studies and Group Studies, you really needed the audience to get into it and comment. The last congo that I was in , I felt it was a battle with them. I kept thinking of that line in Rod Stewarts song " I Was Only Joking"...it went "Dumb blank faces stare back at me" ..They did just that ..
As for the family currently, the complaint is that their hands are too often passed over , with dark suspicion that the WT Conductor has an agenda to freeze them out. That is a simple but effective way of telling you that you are not popular !