Okay. I'll try once more.
<snip> But diving has become a business and it seems it is gradually moving away from the "safe" to the "fast and easy" approach.
Foregoing the teaching of tables is part of this trend, instead of instilling the student with the habit of planning dives, checking gear, using redundancy, etc there is a shift to the disregard with the security, total reliance in the gear and blindness to the risks, all the while pushing new and shinny gear to the customer. The curriculum is but one more facet of the same thing, the will to please the customer and put as many people and as fast in the water and sell as much as possible.
Diving is an industry (not a business). Innovation in the industry has tended, over the decades, to bring out the Chicken-Littles (but instead of "The sky is falling!" we hear "You're gonna die!")
So as not to confuse you, let me use an example that is not dive computers: today we typically dive with gear sets that include alternate second stages, but this wasn't always so, and when this technology was introduced, many made the same kinds of "shiny gear" accusation you have expressed above--that if people were (what the critics felt to be) properly trained, there would be no need for (what the critics termed) unscrupulous, money-grubbing dive instructors/shops/manufacturers to push this (to the critics' minds) unnecessary additional gear onto divers and students. Since you yourself have been recently certified, it's quite likely that during your OW training you were
not taught the skill we call "buddy breathing." While this was a necessary skill to have when divers didn't routinely carry alternate air sources, it is no longer universally taught because advances in equipment (i.e., the advent of the alternate air source) have made it superfluous. There are still some instructors and divers out there who decry the omission of buddy breathing from the curriculum. Is there a risk that a diver's alternate will fail when his/her buddy needs it? Yes there is--it could happen. Does not teaching buddy breathing mean we are "blind" to this risk? No, it does not--it means that the risk is so small as to be inconsequential. Is the sky falling? No, it isn't.
Pleasing customer should only go so far, putting him in danger due to his own ignorance is not acceptable. Diving is dangerous. That is why certifications were needed in first place, that should never be let out of sight.
You are confused (again) here. Certifications are not needed. There are no scuba police. For insurance reasons, most dive operators will require that anyone buying dive services be certified or under the care of a dive professional. It would be entirely counter-productive for us as industry professionals to put ourselves in the position of encouraging divers to engage in behavior that is unequivocally dangerous. Not only would it be morally reprehensible (and we are human, after all), but we would also lose our businesses as we would be unable to buy an insurance policy. Claiming that dive industry professionals wantonly put their students and customers at unreasonable risk is not only ridiculous, but also highly insulting.
Because computers are not standard, tables are for the agency. Tables across agencies also look pretty alike(at least as far as I know), computers vary wildly.
Computers do not vary "wildly." All of them provide the same basic information regarding depth, dive time, remaining bottom time. Some have a few more bells and whistles, and different manufacturers use different mathematical decompression models, but all are generally the same in terms of function. The main difference between one computer and the next from the perspective of the user is what sequence of buttons you push to access the information. Printed dive tables also vary in how you access the information, and like dive computers, because they are based on different mathematical models, the information you get from one table may be significantly different from the information you get from another. In other words, if you plan a specific dive with two set of tables, you are very likely to get two very different sets of results for bottom times, pressure groups, etc. I get the impression you are not aware of this basic fact.
So, all your students computer are the same? Or do you go over each student teaching them individually? How this is best for the students?
You sell them the computer? So you are forcing them unto one brand and model?
Or do they borrow yours? What do they do when they buy theirs one that potentially is very different than yours?
As I said, all computers are similar in function, so there isn't any risk of two computers being "potentially very different." If a student has his/her own computer, s/he learns on that one. If not, I have rentals. No, I don't sell computers, but I will take students shopping to buy one, if they wish. During the shopping trip we can look at various brands and models to find the one that best meets the needs of the diver. When they buy one, if it is different from the rental they learned on, the transition is very easy. It's just a matter of learning which buttons to push. I just had a bunch of certified divers from a US naval vessel here diving, and they rented my computers along with BCDs and regs. They had absolutely no problem with the computers, even though they had never used that model before; in fact, it was so easy for them that they switched the units from metric to imperial and simply let me know that they'd done it so I could switch them back before I put them back into the rental locker. You are making a mountain out of a molehill about the minor differences in using one dive computer compared to the next.
And yet, I don't see how computers figure in the planning stage of the dive. Mine does not. If I want to plan the next 2 dives, I have to use a table.
No you don't have to use a table. Here are a couple of options you are apparently unaware of:
1) You could use the PADI ERDP-ML and never have to know how to trace a line on a table or flip a table to side 2 to see residual N2 loads. But then the ERDP-ML is nothing but a dive planning calculator, and you seem to want to reject electronic devices.
2) You could use any one of a number of dive planning software products out there and cut your own dive-specific tables. But then what is a dive computer if it isn't just a portable way of accessing a piece of software?
Anyway, even using tables doesn't free you up from doing dive planning between dives. Your actual bottom time/depth/surface interval for a dive you have executed may be different from what you planned before the dive, so you'd need to recalculate anyway. But I'm sure you knew that, right?
