>>817106Eagle reporting here.
Look scouting is great and shitty at the same time. It all depends on your troop's organization and your own personality. My troop leadership was a mixture of bunch of vets that generally did not give a fuck and some over-protective dads who would put a band aid on a tiny scratch.
The combination worked out well though, I learned a vast majority of my actual outdoor skills from the former and how to be safe and well organized from the latter. Scouting gave me the experience to plan and execute anything from multi-week backpacking trips to hikes with inexperienced friends of friends.
I ended up working for a few years at my local scout camp eventually as head of the Outdoor Skills area. Teaching new scouts how to properly build a fire, basic wilderness survival, first aid, knots, orienteering, using an axe etc. was a shitton of fun.
The organization gets shat on all the time, but it really does make a difference in a lot of young men's lives. We'd get a lot of kids from messed up home lives, with disabilities, and/or with severe ADD and other behavioral issues. The BSA is pretty well equipped to deal with all of these cases, and gives these individuals an opportunity to experience life away from their problems and away from school/computers/video games. I know that scouting helped me to man up through my developmental years as it does for so many others.
