Everyone wants to back a winner. Lloyd thinks that makes him a winner.
I interject briefly to add an extra point to your detailed summary. This has now become Lloyd Evans vs Kim Silvio and by extension vs the whole exjws-non-lloyidians community at large. Has anyone noticed that he has been spending most of his resources and time and money and energy to fight against Kim et al., rather than WatchTower? Previously he was making money and profit battling WT. Now he is making money (less and less I daresay) by battling Kim and anyone who is against him. That is a point. He needs the Us vs Them ideology to do that. That is the reason he has never disclosed that the Court's been demanding to handle evidence for months. I am sure his plan was to keep this legal battle alive for years. He needed that for so many reasons. You probably guess what the reasons are. But again he knows that the battle against WT is over for him. It is a tiring, tedious and boring job and if this doesn't bring money and popularity then what's the point? It was easy when he had brains around him to do the hard work for him. But now his mission is different. He needs to capitalize from this Kim Silvio business as much as he can. He knows that many exjws are easy to manipulate. As you said, many don't do research. They like to hear what they want to hear. They pay money and don't even know why. It doesn't matter if it is for the "good news" or "lloyd's cause". And he knows that. Posting every now and then something against WT just for the bare minimum but working constantly on how to defeat his opponents and enemies. This Patron business and YT subscribes purchasing has nothing to do with WT. It is purely for his one and only mission he has got. And on a long run this may become an obsession and be seriously dangerous.