I tend to agree, the JW position on hell is sometimes difficult to defend from a literal interpretation of many biblical passages, but it’s easy to defend from a logical and moral perspective.
Christ Alone, you sound a lot like many of the born again Christians I used to debate this with when I was “in”. If the only way to escape God’s infinite wrath is to become a Christian, what happens to the millions of Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists etc etc who are not convinced by the Christian message, founded as it is on a vengeful Jewish God, and who chose to live a devout and holy life in their own peaceful religion? It seems to me that those who “leave” as you put it, but who cling to Christianity, suffer their own cognitive dissonance, by having to reconcile the beautiful message of Christ with the primitive, vindictive, irrational and completely unjustifiable punishment the hell doctrine involves. And they do this of course because they want to hold on to the divinely inspired concept of the bible. I find your statement that, “Since God is holy and infinite, and sins committed against him require the full magnitude of divine punishment, this requires that punishment be infinite” to be absurd in the extreme (and that’s putting it politely). I think death (which is also infinite) to be sufficient punishment for the poor Buddhist mentioned above. Yes, I said that I would rather go to hell than worship a God that would create it. I also say that the only people worthy of hell are those that preach it. I think there's something deeply disturbing about a philosophy that promotes as acceptable the eternal torture of people who don’t accept their message.