I think that different approaches to qualitative research are incomplete and partial in different ways from each other (and different again from quantitative research). I don’t know who is engaged in your collaborative auto-ethnography but I know it must be a subset of everyone who participated in rhizo14 who all experienced it differently (as you say with their own baggage). In Narrative Inquiry http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1218/2653#g1 there is an in-depth conversation between researcher and narrator and an opportunity to check back on the narrative. So it has the advantages of rich development of narrative but still has the disadvantage of researcher lens, etc. I don’t think it would be possible to achieve complete mutuality in research of something like rhizo14, as you say. I think an important way to achieve reflexivity is to be as open as possible about the research process and to explore the role of the researchers http://francesbell.wordpress.com/2014/09/01/getting-another-perspective/
If that happens then complementary and even contradictory research can be amenable to further knowledge construction by readers and other researchers.