Thanks! No need for a lengthy debate, I'm just very curious about how people decide where to donate, especially when the process leads to explicitly non-EA decisions. Your reasons are in fact pretty close to what I would have guessed, so I suppose similar intuitions are quite common and might explain part of why an idea as obvious as effective altruism took so long to develop.

But yeah, a subthread about this in the OT sounds like a good idea (unless I can find lots of old discussions on the subject).