I would encourage the following distinction: Trusting your intuition that Damo's personality, methods, and/or school do not resonate with you (ie your personal preference) is one thing, trusting your intuition about who embodies the Dao more (ie something that transcends your personal preference) is quite another.
Damo's personality, methods and school are not going to resonate with everybody. They are very physical and and exercise in discomfort tolerance for a long time, and the overall ethos is that developing competence/skill/mastery is in general is good, and neigong is not an exception because it is "spiritual". If you've been involved in the pursuit of mastery at a physical activity where the training is uncomfortable previously, and feel "That was a good thing that I did", you'd be more likely to resonate with Damo.
Re Reddit threads, as a rule, Damo's students don't proselytize for him on the internet, so internet discussions of him will as a matter of course be populated by people who don't like him.
Re foundations and Damo vs Nathan: let me give a very specific example. Day 1 with Nathan is pore breathing. But who can feel and consciously control their pores? So you basically have to fake it till you make it. With Damo, the analog of pore breathing he teaches is what he calls qi sealing breathing, and he teaches it at the end of year 3 of the academy. The instructions he gives take as a given that you have built the dantian shell/yin field and have done a lot of work on song and ting of the tissues by that point and build off that. My experience was "Ohhhh THAT'S what that's supposed to feel like". But I don't and can't know if I would have gotten the same ah-ha moment had I went and practiced with Nathan in person. All I can say for sure is that it's a difference in approach. That was the first method where I could directly compare Damo vs Nathan. The others I've found follow the same pattern. (If this made you curious, Damo's qi sealing breathing method is actually on youtube, somewhere in his qi deviations course, though for reasons just explained it will be different to try it without foundational work. But he put it on there, so he must have thought it can do at least a little something for someone without a foundation.)
