"Another consideration besides gasoline is the restrictions that distance puts on a family's participation in parish life."
Exactly. If you care enough about all this to make a change in the first place you're not going to be just a Sunday participant. Mid-week services, educational programs, and other lay organizations all meet during the week.
I guess my main point was that people not be too critical of the orthodox and traditional Episcopalians. It takes time to figure out where you can realistically go, what is going to be workable for you and your family. The "all politics is local" saying is really more applicable to religion than it is to politics. For the majority of people, these "distance" and "local" factors are the main factors in decision-making.
Of course GC 2003 was just the final nail in the coffin so to speak. We had been uneasy about remaining in our parish and ECUSA for some time, and I had been thinking in a Catholic direction for years, because we were always very "high church." What happened after GC 2003 was that we went actively searching for a new church home.
We sadly had to rule out the only orthodox high-church parish remaining in Atlanta -- too far away, too small, under siege from the bishop, a retiring long-time rector, and with a median congregation age of something like 65 it offered nothing for our children. We visited several other churches but settled on our current parish as The One. Had an interesting "leading" in answer to prayer in the parking lot, too . . .
A bonus is that it's half the distance from our house that our old parish was.