The despacho makes most sense inside the wider Andean pattern of reciprocity that Catherine J. Allen described in the Quechua community of Sonqo. Nothing there moves in one direction. Labour is exchanged, coca is exchanged, hospitality is exchanged, and the exchanges are remembered and balanced over years. The earth and the mountains are inside that system rather than outside it: they give pasture, water and increase, and what is owed back is given in the same currency of attention and material.
On that reading a despacho is not a payment to a deity in the transactional sense a Western reader might reach for. It is a contribution to an ongoing relationship with parties who are, in a real sense, neighbours, and the failure it guards against is not divine anger so much as a relationship falling out of balance.
Which is why the commercial version raises a genuine problem rather than a snobbish one. Despachos are now assembled for visitors in Cusco and elsewhere, performed on a schedule and paid for in cash by people who will leave. Practitioners and communities disagree, sometimes sharply, about whether that is an extension of the practice or a hollowing of it, and the argument is theirs. What can be said from outside is narrow: the object being sold is real, the specialists doing it are frequently real specialists, and a transaction with someone who is not going to be there next year is a different kind of thing from the one the practice is built out of.