I think that's a good point that in essence, when you really get right down to the nitty gritty, that the Witnesses started out believing that only the heavenly class, the 144,000 were necessary or really the body of Christ.
The rest of us are just skirt hangers, as I used to call it. We're just tagging along so they'll have something and someone to be ruling over from their heavenly abode, or something like that. I never was really convinced that the "earthly class" weren't second class Christians, but, yeah, they are. We got thrown a bone, basically, because we really didn't fit in with original WTS doctrine.
Of course, the carrot of "everlasting life" on earth is dangled, but really, all that "great crowd of other sheep"nonsense was just a patch job when someone started counting back at Brainwash Central and started worrying that there were getting to be a lot more than 144,000 Witnesses and still no coming of the Lord to carry them all off to heaven.
The real underlying problem of the Witness doctrines are that they are essentially an Adventist religion, and always have been. Adventists NEED a second coming (advent) of Christ for validity like ducks need water. So, they either have to wait for them indefinitely, and humans just hate waiting for anything for too long or invent an advent, which is what the Witnesses did. It became an invisible advent, and they were able to stick their borrowed date of 1874, then 1914 on it and voila! New Adventist sect.
Most Adventist sects are smallish compared to mainstream Christianity, and usually die out over time. Witnesses are no exception. No one wants to wait forever, even for the Lord. Most Christians just prefer to focus on other aspects of Christian teaching...Christ didn't spend a lot of time discussing his "return" nor the details (except to say there was no way of knowing when it would be) and so they give it due import, which is little.
