1. there are limits to what you can achieve with frugality alone
2. it is far, far easier to reach financial independence if you have higher income (or other sources of money, obviously)
3. there are vastly different grades of FIRE mostly dictated by stache size (entirely dependent on (2))
4. a lot of the community seemingly focuses ONLY on frugality and not at all on the input side of wealth building
5. the bloggers in the community cater to (4)
6. on top of all of that, the FI blogger community in general has a ton of survivorship bias baked into almost every topic (examples: a lot of the community seems to believe they'll never get sick, there is very little attention paid to the differences between luck-of-birth-date investment cohorts, time-and-effort-intensive frugal lifestyles are probably not sustainable long term, etc.)
Not to pick on you, because I think all of these observations are valid. But I was made aware of the blowback against the FW today and I want to take a look at a couple of these items, which I have also seen brought up elsewhere.
Points 1-3 boil down to something like, "if you have a lot of money coming in, doing things that require a lot of money (non-ERE RE) are easier." Um, yes? In other news, it's easier to get laid if you're very attractive, it's easier to become a great musician if your parents inculcate you in the world of sound from age 2, and it's easier to sail across the ocean if you already have a boat. I really don't get why this is so shocking to some people. Early retirement is at best a distant dream unless you can save 40+% of your income, and for a huge swathe of Americans, that means either very thin living, or later retirement.
Regarding your points 4-5, I can only imagine that this is because focusing on the input is just a lot harder. It's very difficult to give useful advice about how to improve income. And a lot of the advice is fraught. One of the best ways to get more money is to switch jobs to something that pays more, or to use school or training to improve your skills. But those options have huge potential downsides, whereas buying less meat at the grocery store basically doesn't. The output side contains a lot of elements that are either mostly or fully under the control of the person doing the spending, whereas the input side really doesn't. How much I make has a huge luck component, but how much I spend is 95+% my decisions.
And before someone asks me about unplanned medical expenses, well, sure! Bad luck is a thing. But you'll still have $1 more if you buy the $2 eggs rather than the $3 ones. Many/most frugal decisions can be examined in isolation and are purely a function of discipline, which is much less true of decisions that go into improving income.
Point 6 is also totally valid, but survivorship bias is literally everywhere, especially when it comes to things that are popular. I mean, it's almost the definition of popularity in a socially generated medium like blogging.
It's totally valid to wish for candor, but it's also totally valid to consider your income a private matter. If your blog's purpose is to treat the spending side of the equation, then how much you're bringing in seems rather irrelevant. One thing that is important is not to sell something you can't deliver. "Follow my advice and you'll be able to retire in ten years," is not a good thing to say. "Follow my advice and you will spend less money than you would otherwise, and, oh, by the way, if you're in a certain income range early retirement is attainable," is a perfectly fine thing to say, and the income range of the person saying it really has diddly squat to do with it.
