Define "better" in the context of large categories of religious traditions. I am not used to using that adjective for this class of nouns, and it doesn't strike me as a helpful one. But if I were to paint-roller groups of related religious traditions as "good" and "not good", I don't think "being correct" and "capturing reality" would be among my deciding criteria. Why? Because that's not what religions are built to do. They're built to make reality (i.e The Human Condition) bearable, not capture it. Religious doctrine and practice interface with the big bad secular world by having, to those who carry them, at least a modicum of plausibility, to which a frail and fleeting human being can hang his or her hopes and dreams that all this pain called living is for a greater cause.
Of course, religious traditions
can, and in some cases probably have, succeeded at "being correct" and/or "capturing reality". And if that's what you're looking for, then really only you can decide whether any religious community's stated beliefs or actual practices based on those beliefs, fit into your own personal rubric for "correct" and "real". You might talk to people who tried out Dharmic-based religious communities -- they're not that rare in the West anymore. But interestingly enough, Westerners seldom pass these traditions intergenerationally, even in the fairly uncommon cases that they hold them close for a lifetime.
I'm not saying that this will necessarily be your experience, but I think it says something about who the Dharmic religious schools were made by, and for. Religious schools that today fall into the bucket labeled "Hinduism" are just the indigenous spiritual belief and practice systems of India. As such they are an extension or foisting of the Indian worldview, i.e. the way Indian people see themselves and their place in relation to one another and the natural world, onto the seldom-seen and largely ineffable world of the supernatural. They make references and draw analogies to relationships, attitudes, and modes of conduct that would be immediately recognizable to someone raised in that cultural milieu. I think it would be safe to say that someone born and raised by South Asians in a homogeneously South Asian community would be much more likely to find a Hindu faith profoundly moving than someone with a different background.
Buddhism is also indigenous to India, Dharmic in its basic doctrine and history, and really an umbrella grouping of many independent religious schools and communities. Many Hindus consider Buddhism part of their faith bloc, which is both historically and philosophically correct,
and sheer Indian ethnocentric hubris (depending who you ask
). The difference is that Buddhism was built to be exported and be universally accessible to anyone who reached for it for refuge. As such the vast majority of people who claim membership in a community that reveres the Buddha are not people with a fundamentally Indian way of seeing and dealing with the world. So in theory some form of Buddhism is capable of thriving in the West. But here's the kicker: Buddhism diffused out of India many centuries ago, and in each place it has taken root, it has adapted itself to become, like Hinduism in India, a logical extension of the way local followers see and relate to the secular world. Thus I have found that you cannot take the Japanese culture out of Zen Buddhism, and being an active part of a Zen community will require one to accept some Japanese cultural conceits. For a few, this is no problem, but I would guess the reasons most Westerners leave Zen circles eventually is because the terms and practices used for hinting at their place in the Greater Picture are alien and awkward to them, in a way that would not feel so to the average Japanese spiritual seeker.
In a similar way, I've met a lot of Buddhist purists, who've wanted to access the lineage of teaching closest to the source. Unfortunately there are no known Sanskrit-language Buddhist schools in existence anymore, and I don't even believe an entire set of Sanskrit-language sutras and commentary (that wasn't retroactively re-translated back to Sanskrit or another Indic language, that is), is still in existence. Even practically all Buddhist Indian citizens proximally trace their lineage, language of religious instruction, and genetic heritage to the peoples of the Himalayas. So anyway, the closest you get to the source is Tibetan schools. But the daily practice and the handing on of the verbal tradition are indelibly dyed in Tibetan culture, to the point where getting much spiritual value out of it -- as opposed so simply being a historian, philosopher, or anthropoligist about it -- requires taking on a somewhat Tibetan mindset. Probably a bit more palatable in the long term to most Westerners than turning Japanese, but still pretty different, and possibly more than you bargained for.
Do any religious communities that overtly align themselves "Hindu" or "Buddhist" have a future in the West? That is to say, robustly passed intergenerationally by the indigenous peoples of Europe? I would have to say no, though I could be wrong. What I will think you'll see (nay, are already seeing), however, is a revival of the esoteric, mystery schools, gnostic and mystical traditions of the West -- almost all of which share a distant common origin with the exoteric Dharmic faiths, BTW -- with selective borrowings from Dharmic teachings, and to a lesser extent the indigenous spiritual beliefs of other places, to fill in the gaps that have been lost to history. We'll buy the sacred milk, but not the sacred cow.
