What about a "swim through" adventure dive choice for AOW? Surely that would allow enough time to cover the salient points as well as open up a "reality based" Q&A for the instructor and student.
That would be great, but I suspect the majority of locations in which AOW courses are given do not have any swim-throughs. How many divers are going to travel to a location that does have swim-throughs just for the experience in AOW? Learning about swim-throughs seems too important to be optional, as though it's on par with a Fish ID dive.
It just needs to be made part of the OW course. I've learned from this thread that PADI does not officially advise OW students to stay out of overhead environments in general, though they do advise not to enter caves (or to "penetrate wrecks"?). But the line between swim-through and wreck/cave penetration/entry is fuzzy to many divers, and not just new divers. Almost every new diver is going to encounter a swim-through very shortly after completing the OW course. Of the numerous holes I feel were left in my PADI training, I think the lack of dealing with, or even mentioning, swim-throughs is one of the most egregious. It's such a common and controversial topic of discussion here. How can any instructor in good conscience not mention swim-throughs to OW students and give them the tools to decide whether to do a particular swim-through or pass it up? I have read in this thread that some OW instructors do at least mention swim-throughs--and kudos to them--but it's apparently not a required part of the PADI OW curriculum.