Hi Jimbo, your initial post really highlighted the unreliability of meetings as a way of finding out how to recover in AA. It is totally random what you may hear.
Consider the following two statements:
AA is a fellowship of men and women who, through regular and frequent attendance at meetings, achieve sobriety. FALSE.
The AA program is a set of principles, spiritual in nature, which, if practiced as a way of life, can expell the obsession to drink. TRUE.
I have met a lot of folk over the years who have tried to follow the first statement for two or three years, that being the advice they were given in the meetings, and been disappointed that life had not improved. They had concluded that as nothing had changed, AA didn't work and they might as well pack it in.
When they find out about the second statement they often say "nobody told me that" and when they get to work on it, their lives do change for the better.
Your question is answered in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholism has only two components outlined in the following statement.
"We hope we have made clear the distinction between the alcoholic and the nonalcoholic. If, when you honestly want to, you find you cannot quit entirely, or if when drinking, you have little control over the amount you take, you are probably alcoholic. If that be the case, you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer."
Question: How many meetings do you have to attend to have a spiritual experience? The clue might be in the fact that when this solution was discovered, meetings did not exist. We recover by the steps we take, not the meetings we make.