Good points to raise Jscatt. Possibly there are one or two misconceptions in what you have been told. I thought Fly put it well when he said AA is for people that want it. The starting point for me is to see how my experience lines up with that described in the big book, the first 43 pages or so. Do I fit?
That helped me define what the problem was, and what the AA solution is. AA shares experience through the book, and through the recovered members, of what we did that worked. It is very clear in the big book that we don't tell you whether you will succeed or fail, or what you must do. We will tell you what we did. Expressions like "here are the steps we took" "Half measures availed us nothing" and "No doubt you want to know what you have to do. We shall tell you what we did" And we clearly say "if you think you can do it another way, we encourage you to follow your conscience." In this sense there are no musts about it.
But in order to recover we found there were many musts, many unavoidable things that we just had to do, and for sure, most of us would have avoided much of it if we could have. But we often ended up drunk when we did that.
AA welcomes anyone serious about solving their drink problem. We have a single way that worked with us, and we can show you how we did it. But we do not claim that our meetings can sober people up. We don't claim that sponsors can sober anyone up. We don't claim we have any special powers to sober people up, and we don't claim that anything less than total committment to the 12 steps as a way of life will bring about the much desired result.
But our book is full of promises for those who choose to travel our path, and those promises all came true for me.