Good question!

I have gained a lot of emotion handling skill. This lets me be calmer and kinder to my wife and my son and other people. It also means I suffer less because I can more easily detect negative thoughts and feelings and (to some extent) disengage from them rather than feed them.

I am also slowly getting better at actively cultivating positive/happy/pleasant mind states.

Neat! Thanks!

I speak not from experience here, but according to my limited understanding, the idea is that most or all ideas of the "self" are more-or-less arbitrary abstractions like the Ship of Theseus. 

Via western philosophy of mind you can gain some understanding of this idea and convince yourself that it is probably true, but via meditation AFAIU it becomes possible to observe this directly in your own mind.

The benefits of "transcending" the concept of self, I believe, is that you suffer less and become happier.

Thanks!

Good points. Thanks!

E.g., I expect someone from Camp 1 to have a much harder time "vibing".

Could I ask you to please elaborate on what you mean by this?

May I ask you some questions about your Camp #1 intutions (since I have pretty strong Camp #2 intuitions)?

As I see it, the really interesting qualia are not things like redness. The really interesting qualia are the ability to experience enjoyment and suffering.

I hope it is obvious that there exist some things that are able to suffer and enjoy - for example, humans. (And there probably exist other things which cannot.) Likewise, there exist things which can process information and act on it by moving their bodies and manipulating their environment. (This includes most-if-not-all animals as well as many machines.)

What is the relationship between the ability to process information and the abilities to suffer and enjoy?

That is of course a broad and vague question, so let me ask a more specific one.

Humans are able to enjoy eating food and resting. It is reasonable to surmise that some animals likewise enjoy eating and resting (perhaps even all animals).

Now consider a lawn mower robot which is programmed to notice when its battery is running low and return to its charging station to "eat and rest". Does the robot enjoy charging? Why or why not?

The true test of a saint is this - if doing the right thing would lead to lifelong misery for you and your family, would you still do it?

This seems to be based on a false dichotomy: "Either I genuinely want to do good AT ANY AND ALL COSTS, or all my attempts to do good are insincere."

I would argue that there are other possibilities besides those two. A person can genuinely desire to do good because he truly likes to do good, but he has other likes and goals as well and will sometimes sacrifice one goal for the other.

As far as I can tell, you do not really argue why you think platitudes contain valuable wisdom. You only have one example, and that one is super-vague. 

For me this post would be much better if you added several examples that show in more detail why the platitude is valuable.

I have heard a number of people saying that they don't want to give money to charity because they don't trust the charities spend the money well.