From my experience with scouting when i was "a kid"......
the thing that kept me coming to meetings, wasnt the uniform, the eagle rank(even though I did attain it), it was the things we did as a troop, We had a really good set of Adult leaders who kept us doing challenging things on our weekend outings, those alone kept kids coming back week after week.
I think boys can put up with some of the trivial issues like the cooking merit badges, and leatherwork class, if they know they are going to do some "fun/cool" stuff.
We went on a wild cave trip my 1st year in scouting, did lots