Welcome to the board, SL.
I wasn't born in the truth, I came in voluntarily (eek!) Well, that's over and done with, thank goddess! Anyway, one of the things I was always entirely skeptical of was the "annointed" and all that "abba, father" stuff. According to JW doctrine, it's absolutely true, anyone can claim they are of the annointed. And who are we to judge? In fact, according to JW doctrine, we are NOT to be judges of each other. So all this crap involving Elders and Judicial Committees is such that - so much crap.
Anyway, back to the annointed. The doctrine is a double-edged sword dangling over the head of the old buzzards on the GB in New York. On the one hand, they WANT the freedom to be able to appoint/annoint anyone they want (yes men, every last one of them) to the GB, and it doesn't make any difference that they were born well after the class of the annointed supposedly closed for good in 1935. By the way, anyone born in 1935 would today be at least 71 years old. On the other hand, since the doctrine IS so wide open, ANYONE, and I do mean anyone, can claim that they are annointed. And so they have. That's why we have not seen a steady decrease in the numbers of annointed over the years, although statistics say that we should see a steady decline. Instead, in some years, we've actually seen INCREASES in the number of annointed. Now, according to JW doctrine, the only way an annointed one can be replaced is if he (or she) falls into gross unrepentant sin (or something like that); then, and only then, is a replacement designated by Jehovah's Holy Spirit. What I'm not clear on, and it seems that no one is clear on, is whether this annointed-now-sinner has to die in order to be replaced with a new annointed, or if he or she only has to be an unrepentant sinner for a certain amount of time, say six months (buy now, pay later).
That's a sideline, though. The important point is that, according to the JW doctrine, there must be a LOT of unrepentant sinning annointed ones out there, judging by the amount of increase of new annointed we are seeing in the yearly statistics. So, you are absolutely 100% right in questioning this JW doctrine. It's got a hole through it as large as the hole one finds in old-fashioned "ring-baloney" (sometimes called "ringed-baloney", hence the old saying, you're full of baloney i.e., your story has such a big hole in it, you can drive a TRUCK through it, ha ha ha!)
So, that's the thought process I went through, and through subsequent lurking and reading here, discovered that lots of other people "discovered" the same home truths. One other important thing, people are here for lots of different reasons, or maybe no reason at all, they just enjoy it. But in our own ways, we're all on journeys to either enlarge what truth we already know, or to discover our own truth for ourselves. And none of that truth has anything to do with "The Truth" as sold by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
