I think the discussion is getting too nuanced to procede only from raw hypotheticals.
I'll just add that if you consider religions as 'crazy cults' I would say they're much more successful than charities (when the charity is real, of course, not some legal way to evade taxes), but also that flying saucers cults are less successful than religion because weirdness is almost by definition low status.
That said, I feel that we've arrived to a point where if we want to further the discussion we would really need to start writing equations and assigning probabilities...