The value of a board like this is that you will get a wide variety of opinions on any topic. Some will be of more value than others, but all of them are food for thought, and may cause the original poster or other readers to consider possibilities which would not have occurred to them without the input of the community here. When ANY story of a dive incident is told, there are two sides, and most of the time, we don't get to hear the other one. But sometimes one can imagine it -- and sometimes those imaginings are undoubtedly completely wrong.
Here, you have a very, very strange behavior on the part of the OP's buddies. I've been diving for ten years, in a lot of different places and around a wide variety of divers, and I have never seen anyone dragging a diver to the surface. I've seen people swim away from their buddies, and people ascend at vastly different rates. I've seen people hold divers DOWN when ascent rates are uncontrolled (I have done that myself). Because the described behavior is so unusual and egregious, I don't blame many posters for assuming there HAD to be a good reason why it occurred. But we don't know why it was done, because we haven't heard from the people who did it. And we do know, from stories told here, that there are some strange divers in the water.
It's likely most everything that can be said about this incident has been said. It is rude to lay hands on another diver, and it causes them significant difficulties managing their own buoyancy. It is difficult for a new diver to know what to do, when they think they are doing what they should, and someone with more experience is telling them otherwise. Running out of gas underwater is very dangerous and the precipitant of many fatalities, and if the draggers in this case thought that was the problem, they should have explained that in the post-dive discussion. Otherwise, slow ascents in the shallows are generally desirable, and no one should argue with someone's desire to follow their computer's ascent rate, assuming there are no safety considerations (bad ocean conditions or boat traffic) to mandate getting out of the shallows.
I hope the OP has not been put off with the criticism, but has simply taken the various posts as information, to look at the situation from a variety of perspectives, and learn from it.
Here, you have a very, very strange behavior on the part of the OP's buddies. I've been diving for ten years, in a lot of different places and around a wide variety of divers, and I have never seen anyone dragging a diver to the surface. I've seen people swim away from their buddies, and people ascend at vastly different rates. I've seen people hold divers DOWN when ascent rates are uncontrolled (I have done that myself). Because the described behavior is so unusual and egregious, I don't blame many posters for assuming there HAD to be a good reason why it occurred. But we don't know why it was done, because we haven't heard from the people who did it. And we do know, from stories told here, that there are some strange divers in the water.
It's likely most everything that can be said about this incident has been said. It is rude to lay hands on another diver, and it causes them significant difficulties managing their own buoyancy. It is difficult for a new diver to know what to do, when they think they are doing what they should, and someone with more experience is telling them otherwise. Running out of gas underwater is very dangerous and the precipitant of many fatalities, and if the draggers in this case thought that was the problem, they should have explained that in the post-dive discussion. Otherwise, slow ascents in the shallows are generally desirable, and no one should argue with someone's desire to follow their computer's ascent rate, assuming there are no safety considerations (bad ocean conditions or boat traffic) to mandate getting out of the shallows.
I hope the OP has not been put off with the criticism, but has simply taken the various posts as information, to look at the situation from a variety of perspectives, and learn from it.