I mention all this because I find that people from outside the Bay Area or those with very little contact with Leverage often think that Connection Theory

Um, this person from outside the Bay Area with very little (i.e.no) contact with Leverage does not think about Connection Theory at all. It may be something that looms large in the circle of people you know, even those of them in the outer darkness beyond the Bay Area, but that is bound to be a small subset of LessWrong.

I see that Leverage and CT have been discussed here before, here and here, although none of the links there to their site work any more. The current Leverage site looks like something designed from the top down that hasn't bottomed out in real things yet, a shell still under development. There is no information about Connection Theory to be found there at the moment.

Perhaps someone from Leverage could write something here to say what the criticisms of the OP are criticisms of?