OWS was effective (and it was effective, look at my submission history sort by top, i know what I'm talking about) precisely because it was the first time a lot of people had ever looked out their windows and seen an angry mob that wouldn't just go away. We were the angry unpredictable people in the street, not your student teacher association planned luncheonette and demonstration. And then we started raising money, and we started spreading to other cities, and that doubled down on why the whole nation took it seriously (and it was taken very seriously at the time). There were days at the height, when there were quite literally several million people in the street across America, and that message got through to everyone.
It was only after we got bogged down 2-5 months in, when we didn't continue growing exponentially, when we didn't become violent, when the establishment chose not to take us under their wing, when we couldn't effectively out spend our opponents (correctly, or often even try), and most of all, when the nypd managed to contain us (in nyc) to one small park so our physical on location numbers stopped growing, that we were able to be dismantled (and fuck what the news said, we were absolutely intelligently dismantled).
But no, we didn't need weathermen. And there were absolutely discussions about it, don't get me wrong. But we didn't need the weathermen. There's no faster way to get a population to turn against you then hurting people.* And asking a nation of people to reform on an issue that is spiraling towards violence is much more difficult than asking a nation of people to just reform on an issue. What we needed was the societal understanding that as a nation, a large part of the population cared enough about the issue, so deeply, that it was understood by everyone that things would get to that point if reform didn't happen.
No, what OWS needed to accomplish, was to make the above paragraph understood. But it was 1 part, that we didn't know how to do that, and 1 part that as a nation, we probably didn't actually care about it enough to make it happen. America was angry about 2008, and about injustices ingrained in our economy, but we still thought it made sense for the police to keep the streets clear for traffic so people could go about their day. We still had faith that one of the political parties would take us under their wing (it'd just happened to the tea party, right? Well, no, but your average person didn't know that either).
And the thing is, I think we learned enough about it during the process, so even if today the economy really took another 2008 dive, you'd see OWS on steroids jump out of the wood work. A lot of people learned a lot, and formed a lot of connections. But so far that hasn't happened yet, so we'll see.