This is a subject I have huge interest in due to my specialities on shark attack and shark behaviour and although I would also rather encounter sharks in a totally natural scenario I have to say that...
The anti-shark feeding movement hugely misses the point and bases it's argument on heresay, myths and mis-information.
Sharks do not associate humans as food due to shark feeding.
Shark behaviour is not being altered, it is perfectly natural behaviour for a scavenger to make the benefit of an easy meal.
Sharks do not expend unneccessary energy sourcing an attractant any more than they would through being attracted by a speared fish.
Since shark feeding has become more widespread with more people getting closer to sharks than ever, incidents of shark bites continue to decline on average.
Sharks are intelligent animals, the decision to predate often requires a number of factors being considered, 400 million years of evolution and we suddenly decide they aren't intelligent enough to understand what their normal prey and predatory behaviour is?
Ever since man has used the ocean, sharks have equated boats with the possibility of an easy meal.
A shark attracted to an area because of a stimulus such as scent will not start indiscriminately biting people in the area unless otherwise encouraged to do so due to a fault on behalf of the diver.
Shark diving operations are absolutely the best chance sharks have of widespread protection, they encourage conservation through economic benefit to often poor areas through jobs, training schemes and the infux of tourist money spent throughout businesses and services in the area, that money relies on a healthy population of sharks to attract those tourists. If it pays, it stays. It's not ideal, regular feeding can aggregate individual sharks to an area and could suffer from visiting fishermen, however, through an aggregated population of healthy sharks, it becomes more achievable to attain protected marine reserves where fishermen cannot enter.
In an ideal world there would be locations where we could dive and be guaranteed shark encounters, however, due to the negative impact we have had on the world's oceans, those locations are extremely hard to find so specific feeding locations where people can be guranteed shark encounters are the next best thing because when people get that first shark encounter they're changed forever, almost every single one in a positive way in favour of shark conservation.
I agree things could be done better but in removing shark diving operations, it opens the door fro the other shark based commercial opportunities, i.e. fishing, either indistrial or on a smaller scale and that would be catastrophic for sharks the world over.
There is a hige amount of misinformation about shark feeding propogated by a sensationalist media and by those with little to no understanding of shark behaviour.
