Now, see, what you have written here seems about right.
The Orthodox have a sense that praying for the dead is the right thing to do, and a sense that God somehow makes these things work out. Think of the good Orthodox folks who confess regularly but who happened to have had some really nasty covetous and adulterous thoughts on the beach in Thailand just before the tsunami hit. They died unshriven, in a wave sent by God. To Hell with them?
I just can't believe that is the way God really works.
Nor do I think that's really what the Bible says is the way God really works.
There is some sort of "saving catchment", something at work.
As is characteristic of the rational West, which cannot take any issue without flaying it out and counting all its bones, even when they are too small to see with an electron microscope, the doctrine of "Purgatory" has lots of insubstantial meat on those insubstantial bones.
Too much meat, methinks, at least in the old and high forms of the excessive articulation. Sort of like the statues of the Shoulder Wound of Jesus (where he carried the cross) in Old St. Mary's, with the little coin slot and the prayer "Oh shoulder wound of Jesus! Remind us of..." It is meaningful to those to whom it is meaningful. To me it is embarassing, over the top, too much. I am not going to pray before a statue of the shoulder wound of Jesus. First, I don't know that he had a shoulder wound, but then, I would not pray before a blown-up articulation of the lance wound of Jesus either. Yes, that wound had significance. I don't dispute that those who want to place a lot of freight on it and flesh out 75 prayers of articulation in meditation on that are devout and serious. But that's not my thing, and I don't think I need to try to make it my thing in order to please God.
I think the same thing is true about the excessive articulation of the mystery encapsulated in the word "Purgatory".
The Orthodox don't use the word, and don't like the word.
But what they actually think and pray, well, that is pretty much what I believe, and what I think "Purgatory" really means.
I just don't believe that Jesus sent those Orthodox folks caught on the beach before they could be shriven to Hell. That is not the way that the God I worship behaves in MY reading of Him.
And it is not the way I would expect the God I trust behaves. Indeed, if I believed He DID really behave that way, then I would not trust Him or love Him half as much as I do. I would fear him much, much more, and love Him much, much less.
So, what you wrote, Agrarian, sounds like "proto-Purgatory", before the Western doctors dissected the patient. The dissection is an interesting exercise. Dante's "Purgatorio" made ME think, anyway. But what I actually BELIEVE "Purgatory" IS, is whatever that mysterious, not well-defined or understandable thing that the Orthodox and Catholics suspect MUST go on in some sense or other, such that our prayers for the dead mean something, and the unfortunates on the beach aren't roasting in Hell for being unlucky.
One thing that certainly doesn't appear anywhere in Orthodox writings that I have encountered is the Roman pugatorial idea that a "purpose" of the intermediary state in which we find ourselves between death and the final judgment is to undergo some sort of burning and cleansing us from sins.
Orthodox teaching seems to be that the critical thing for all of us is the overall disposition of our soul at the time of death: are we turned toward God and become like him, or are we turned away from him and such that "I never knew you."
As to the "toll-houses," much ink has been spilled on that in Orthodox circles, but the important thing to remember is that they are and always were a metaphor, an imperfect description of what the soul experiences after death.
We have memorial services for the departed on the 3rd, 9th, and 40th day of their repose. The Church has given us some explanations as to why these are important times of transition for the soul, and there are too many experiences that Orthodox Christians (including me) have had surrounding those days to treat this lightly.
But what is described by the Fathers who describe what happens after death is the soul being confronted with his sins. What seems to be happening is not "payment" for sins or "purification" from sins, but rather a revealing to the soul the implications of how one has spent ones life.
There just isn't found in Orthodox thought the idea that every sin has to be legally accounted for in one way or another. There are certainly stories of those who were lost because of a single sin, but the point to the stories generally is that the secretly harbored sin was reflective of the person's true disposition toward God, which he had hid from the world, and perhaps from himself.