Our teachings are not unique. They've been around for two and a half thousand years. Rosemary and I are not actually inventing a single thing that's new. We're just showing possibly a different perspective on how to do what we understand has been taught for two and a half thousand years. As to individual techniques, say the D/D method, no teacher ever taught us that in the way that we're teaching it to you. However, by looking at deeper stories within Buddhism, by looking at our own experience, by looking at how teachers explained other things to us, the D/D method came to one of us in a way that we thought, "Hey this will work! This is a way you can formally practice and organize your thoughts so that that understanding can arise within the scope of formal practice." As to some of the individual techniques like the D/D method, you could say that we've more or less developed them, invented them for lack of a better word. But really it's only showing, or trying to aim at getting the same understanding that is also being pointed at within the scriptures, and has been there for two and a half thousand years.
As to the Buddha encouraging doing reflections for a whole period sitting and such things, yeah he did! Look in the Suttas and you'll find plenty of examples where he's telling you how to think right. There's a listing of forty meditation subjects which actually includes reflection meditation. Two in particular: to reflect on your own generosity (spend the whole time, sit there, reflect on it) and to reflect on your own morality (spend the whole time, sit there, reflect on it). When you look at the Satipattana Sutta in particular, what's it telling us to do in the Fourth Foundation? Figure out where a hindrance came from, figure out how it won't come again in the future, figure out how it goes away, and so on. Isn't this something we've got to think about? So all of the reflection meditations, it was way back, many were even before the Buddha's day, because parts of those forty meditation subjects, were actually something that existed beforehand.
And then the last one, "How sure are you that deeper states of concentration are not beneficial to come to understand reality?" Rosemary and I have never ever said that deeper states of concentration are not beneficial, we've never said that.