Having been reading SB threads for more than a decade and having read thousands of comments about what agencies should be like, I think I have a pretty fair idea of what a number of ScubaBoard regulars believe. Perhaps they don't have the ability to put it together into one whole vision. Perhaps they have never seen a full description of what they believe, so I will try to do it for them now.
The Open Water Course will combine what most agencies have for OW, AOW, and Rescue. It will include other information as well. It will fully prepare students to dive safely in almost all environments. It will take about 100 total hours to teach and will usually be covered over several months of training. There will be at least double the typical pool time of today's classes, and at least 7 OW dives will be required. Students will flock to these classes because of the superior level of training provided.
Instructor Pay will be very different from what it is now. Typical instructors today do not even earn minimal wage. Instructors for this agency will earn wages truly commensurate with their professional status.
Quality Assurance for instructors will be proactive. It will use roughly the same processes used so successfully by the American education system to ensure that we have nothing but high quality teachers in every classroom. Highly skilled instructor evaluators will talk to students who graduate in in-depth interviews to be sure their classes were done right. Those instructor evaluators will sit in on academic sessions and observe both pool and open water sessions conducted my our many, many thousands of instructors all around the world to make sure that they are doing everything as required.
The cost of open water instruction will be many times the cost of current classes because of the need to provide high pay for the instructors teaching those 100 hour courses and because of the need to compensate thousands of full time instructor evaluators working around the world. Students will gladly pay that extra cost because they know they are getting a better education than is offered by agencies today.
Training materials for the open water course will not be online and will not use fancy interactive learning materials. Because it is insulting to highly educated students to read materials that can be understood by the younger children taking the courses, the reading level of the materials will be targeted to the college level reader. It doesn't matter if anyone can read the materials anyway, since the primary mode of instruction will the scintillating lectures of the instructor.
Specialty classes for advanced skills not included in the open water course will not be offered. They are just a money grab. If divers wish to learn specialized skills, they will contract with instructors individually to do so. In that case, the instructors will not be following a prescribed and approved curriculum and they will not have any prepared materials from the agency, so they will not be called instructors. They will instead be called mentors, and they will not accept compensation for teaching those skills. Accepting payment for such work is just another money grab by a greedy scuba industry.
The central leadership of the agency will be comprised of highly educated and skilled professionals, the kind you would expect to see leading successful corporations. These people will be dedicated to the future of scuba and will either volunteer their time or work at minimum wage. If possible, the agency headquarters will be located in an abandoned monastery so that housing costs can be minimized by using old monastic cells. Any money beyond that going to the central administration is a money grab.