I know there are 5, but how many people have actually heard of IDEA and PDIC? Hence the essentially PADI, SSI, SDI.
50% comes from the WRSTC website mission statement.
"The WRSTC's membership is restricted to national or regional councils comprised of the individual training organizations who collectively represent at least 50% of the annual diver certifications in the Member Council’s country or region."
PADI does have those rules, it does not authorize divers to dive beyond 60ft. IF those divers choose to go outside of those limits they are making a conscious decision to dive outside of their certification level. PADI will not revoke their card obviously, but they will interfere if they find out a PADI dive operation is allowing OW divers to dive beyond 60 feet without proper training because of the legal action.
Call PADI's legal department and ask them. They have one of the best legal teams in the world, and they will defend their dive professionals tooth and nail until the bitter end because they have to. If a PADI dive center operates a charter where the depth of the dive is beyond 18m and they allow a PADI OW diver on that dive, that diver dies and their family sues the dive operation the PADI lawyers will likely not defend that dive operation because they allowed a diver on that charter where they had no business being. This is why charters will require AOW certification or whatever certification is required for that dive, it is strictly for lawsuit mitigation. The cert requirements are generally based off of PADI's published training limits. You are not trained to dive beyond 18m, the dive is 20m dive, you need AOW, no ifs ands or buts, it's a CYOA policy for the operator. This is why Peacock requires cave divers to display their cave cards on their windshields while they're diving, the list goes on. The C-cards are there to not only train divers but to also protect the agencies and dive operators from legal action in our sue happy country.
The ideal situation is for the OW courses to take more than 4 days because you can't learn how to dive properly in that amount of time, it just isn't possible, people are lazy, and want instant gratification. Because of this, PADI has broken down their courses into very small chunks with very strict restrictions, if you read. Being trained should mean being qualified, if you aren't qualified you shouldn't have been certified, unfortunately that cuts into the business models for the dive shops and they can't afford not to certify people, so PADI pumps out thousands of new divers every year the VAST majority of whom are completely incompetent and really have no business diving on their own. If you read the RDP it explains all of said restrictions. You are capable of making the decision to go beyond your training limits, that is your decision, but if a diving professional allows you to go beyond those limits while you are under their supervision, they are at risk of a major lawsuit and actually at risk of PADI removing their license which is detrimental for a business.
The lines blur when you look at where and how most OW divers dive. They typically dive off of boats, usually run by a PADI Dive Center, always babysat by a PADI Dive Master *which is a bloody joke btw, their decision to make DM the lowest of the professional certs is idiotic, NAUI has it right with AI then DM where at least with AI first you are under an instructor the whole time, but that's another discussion*, and then they come back. They might do this for maybe 2-4 dives/year, hardly a qualified diver. If that is the situation then the "guidelines" now becomes hard and fast rules because the dive centers can't afford a lawsuit.
If those divers now start doing shore dives, quarries, own their own boat etc then they are diving under the original intent of the certification and are now diving without supervision, problem here is most of the divers aren't doing that and you run into the OP's situations where she did not have the proper training to fully understand the concepts of how and why these rules came to be. Her instructor told her 500psi, do you really think her instructor knows and understands why 500psi is a guideline? If he did, don't you think he would have said, at 18m deep, using an AL80, a good approximation is 500psi, but that does not hold true for all situations and we should sit and discuss how that number came to be? How can a certified diver not figure out what 500psi means and translate that into how long it should last? That is a MAJOR problem, 100% a life threatening problem if you don't understand how to do that. She was told that 500psi is approximately 15 minutes, what happens if a diver treats that as gospel, is diving an AL63 where they now have 20% less gas than they thought. Now that 15 minutes becomes 12 minutes but "oh I had 500 psi, so it must be 15 minutes". That lack of thinking has caused near fatalities on multiple occasions and will continue to do so because that is not the sign of a certified diver, that diver should have gotten the "scuba diver" cert where they are restricted to diving with a professional because they are not safe to dive on their own. Whether there have been fatalities due to it or not, the cold hard fact is that if you don't understand the concepts of how to safely execute a dive with proper gas planning you shouldn't be diving unsupervised. PADI can't afford to take that approach because they would lose their 40% market share or whatever ridiculous number they have and they would have lowered profits due to less divers taking the course, which then cuts into their enormous and excessive dive shop networks profits and the industry giant collapses. They'd end up like GUE where despite the fact that they put out vastly superior divers, almost no one who isn't already certified or who knows a technical diver has ever heard of them. Hell, most shops have no idea what GUE is. I'm not a GUE diver, and don't agree with a lot of what they do/say but you can't argue with the fact that their divers are leaps and bounds ahead of any PADI OW diver coming right out of class.
