What others are telling you is true, but I want to add a voice from the "guided dives can offer a lot to good divers too" -camp. I'm not incompetent & I love having a guide (admittedly I've never had a pushy guide). Yes, It is important that you don't need a DM. You need to be competent in your diving skills and capable of independently taking responsibility for yourself. And you should never dive w/o some local knowledge. That's a basic rule & theme from Ange's Diver Down, and too many incident reports to count. The local knowledge should be in your head after doing your homework.
That said, you can get a lot more out of many dives if someone with local knowledge & experience is diving with you. I enjoy diving w/ a local guide because they can spot so much and maybe tell me later what that critter was, maybe even what it was doing & why. I also have no hope of remembering the map of a dive site as well as the guide. I need to know how to navigate my way to where I'm going, but the guide is more likely to succeed every time in finding all the special stops that might have been on the map: the feeding station on one particular coral pinnacle, that neat cave at 16m, the place with the really big gorgonians, etc. So if you can do it for the right reasons, hiring a guide or DM and enjoying their input doesn't make you a lesser diver. It might however make you someone who got a lot more out of their dives, and someone much more capable of spotting critters for themselves in the future.
That said, you can get a lot more out of many dives if someone with local knowledge & experience is diving with you. I enjoy diving w/ a local guide because they can spot so much and maybe tell me later what that critter was, maybe even what it was doing & why. I also have no hope of remembering the map of a dive site as well as the guide. I need to know how to navigate my way to where I'm going, but the guide is more likely to succeed every time in finding all the special stops that might have been on the map: the feeding station on one particular coral pinnacle, that neat cave at 16m, the place with the really big gorgonians, etc. So if you can do it for the right reasons, hiring a guide or DM and enjoying their input doesn't make you a lesser diver. It might however make you someone who got a lot more out of their dives, and someone much more capable of spotting critters for themselves in the future.
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