mimetic tradition

R' Haym Soloveitchik made the whole notion of "mimetic tradition" popular in certain circles, yet mimeticism for its own sake becomes absurd, as illustrated by the joke here: http://kallahmagazine.com/WordPress/
My feelings on this are split. I do not come from a background with strong particular minhagim passed down to me, so I feel like I don't lose much by adopting for example, a minhag or nusach haGR"A. My wife is descendent from a chain of yekkes, so if I were her, I would probably feel more guilt at not adhering strictly to those minhagim and the psak of the Rama. I do not understand how people who do not come from strong backgrounds come to adopt mimetic minhagim even when it leads to kulos. For example, if you read the gemara straight, there is no excuse not to eat in sukkah on Shmini Atzeres. If someone who has grown up his entire life in a chassidic community with those minhagim, I can understand learning the gemara in a way that is dochak to preserve the received mimetic tradition. However, if an outsider decides to join such a community, how can they intellectually justify abandoning the gemara to preserve a tradition they do not have? In other words, if one is born into a received tradition, then I can appreciate that outweighing a text, but if one is left to one's own devices to choose, why should one choose a mimetic tradition over a received text?