Be aware that there are some reports of these Goenka retreats being cult-like and involving some aspects of brain-washing. Additionally they may force a particular style and experience of meditation.
(I do not wish to start an argument, I am just pointing this out so that readers might be better informed. I have considered going, and did some research online looking for accounts of the experience. I am not decided yet, but time-wise it is not possible for me at the moment.)
Since you say yourself that you are not speaking from personal experience, perhaps it would help to have the words of someone who is speaking from experience.
The meditation retreat is difficult and uncomfortable because of its unfamiliar rules: no interaction with other students, no talking, very strict schedule of waking, meditation, food, and breaks. All of these are tools to eliminate distraction from the reason you are there: to develop a basic capacity to perform the meditation technique properly.
The course materials and instructions repeatedly stress that nothing they say is important; there is no philosophy you have to accept, no ideas you have to believe. As someone who is very logical minded and anti-all-"isms" and beliefs, I would have left after the first day if they didn't stress that you can ignore 100% of everything and anything they say if you just do the meditation technique.
The entire benefit of the experience is derived within you, in the same sense that no matter how many books you read about how touching a flame "burns," the experience of touching a burning stove is how you actually learn "ah, fire BURNS".
Ten days seems a long time to devote to learning "how to meditate", but it simply isn't possible to do in any shorter length of time, nor would it work if you simply did several 1-day sessions.
Suppose you went to the gym every single day, but you only did 1 pushup and 1 crunch every day. You might complain that this whole exercise thing is pointless. This would be a great loss.
Feel free email if anyone has questions. I'd be happy to discuss but the topic would overflow many pages so I'll just leave it for now.
I've done it and I didn't find it at all cultlike. They had a donation booth at the end with no pressure to actually donate, and that's it. Nobody's tried to contact me or pressure me or anything like that. Most of the retreat is spent in silence.
As for the links you posted, the first one had a bad experience at an incompetently run retreat (it was tl;dr so I didn't finish it - maybe there were more problems). I can say that I was well fed at the one I went to. The second one is by an obvious lunatic who was mad that they didn't recognize that he's many times more egoless than they are. Other reports trashing the retreat that I've seen (and I read a ton of them before signing up), with the hindsight of having actually done it, mostly come across as people who feel like losers because they couldn't finish the retreat, so they blame it on anyone but themselves.
http://melissamaples.com/how-not-to-do-a-goenka-vipassana-re...
http://www.greatwesternvehicle.org/criticism/goenka.htm
(I do not wish to start an argument, I am just pointing this out so that readers might be better informed. I have considered going, and did some research online looking for accounts of the experience. I am not decided yet, but time-wise it is not possible for me at the moment.)