But this is how it always goes with religions. There is never a definitive core belief or core morality that everyone agrees with. Religions are meta-moralities that allow participants to feel credible and sincere because they're doing whatever they're doing under the cover story of a tradition.
Sometimes the results are humane, sometimes they're horrific. It's exactly that flexibility and the lack of clear unquestionable definitive absolutes that allows these belief systems to persist.
Everyone assumes their interpretation - or at least their process - is the only correct one, and all those other people are misguided at best and just plain Doing It Wrong at worst.
Personally I have more time for Buddhism than for any of the Abrahamic religions. But even fundamentals like the details of the Noble Eightfold Path are still debated and even contested, so nothing about it is as clear and straightforward as it might seem to be.