HH-
That is very well thought out, and expressed response. Really enjoyed your insight!
Thanks.
In speaking with a purposefully very broad brush, I think that a lot of the reasons for the historical discussions in the "Concerned Over Watered Down Training" topic are basically been on a concern for safety which says that a reduction in diver skills/competency
should have resulted in more deaths/accidents ... but this hasn't happened, and they're unable to figure out precisely why.
We've seen dive training change over the years, and the claimed rationale has often been that "unnecessary" stuff has been eliminated (which infers that past divers were literally over-trained), plus that the procedures have been reorganized to be more efficient (improved productivity of training).
While both are probably have elements of truth within them, the IMO more basic underlying motivation was to grow the industry by increasing the consumer base via a strategy of reducing the barriers to entry. The net result of this is that there clearly must have been "reductions" in diver training comprehensiveness that have occurred which ate into whatever our safety margin existed to the point, although it didn't appeared to have had resulted in any significant change to reported accident incidence rates.
However, what I believe has happened ... and which is also a significant contributing factor ... is that diving has become "easier" (lower risk) on average.
Specifically, since circa ~1985, diving has undergone a very significant shift in the statistical distribution of the types of dives that were being performed: the typically more "difficult" local coldwater diving has declined and the "easy" tropical vacation diving has increased.
Now where things get interesting is that if a larger percentage of the diving being performed today are lower risk, then we should have seen a clear & significant reduction occur. Granted, it has been quite awhile, but I used to buy every single one of the DAN Annual Accident Reports (and read them cover-to-cover): my recollections are that the incidence rates have been pretty darn constant at around 100 deaths/year for many years now.
What the implications are is that if the diving population (as a generalized whole) is doing safer-on-average dive profiles, if the accident rate isn't also declining commensurately ... then statistically, divers simply cannot be as "safe" as they used to be.
FWIW, while it is tempting to blame training for this, there are other risk factors which will naturally contribute, such as diver health & fitness (heart attacks, etc). Of course, when we also see that the training standards have been relaxed on such fitness matters (and other classical contraindicactors), we might also conclude that relaxed training standards
are actually in part to blame.
An aside that doesn't fit well with this conversation's flow: there's also a philisophical question on what is/isn't "Acceptable Risk" in terms of annual fatality rates. It seems that the same ~100/year is what everyone is comfortable with, regardless of the basis for their comfort with this Status-Quo.
There's other philisphically-based questions to ask too. For example, should there be an issue with having the training standards only require a "basic" set of diving skills if all that that diver is going to do are the equally basic "easy" dives under benign conditions? Yes, the shortcoming here is that conditional "if", and how we are able to adequately educate divers to stay out of conditions that they're not qualified for...currently, the industry does a poor job of this by the very nature of the "AOW" name that they use in their product marketing.
What's subtle to all of this is that it was pretty much expected back in "The Old Days" that a first year novice would finish training with 4 dives, then pair up with a slightly more experienced mentoring (non-instructing) diver and go gain his experience locally, which often could be on a coldwater wreck dive to 120fsw with <10ft viz, currents, 6ft swells, fishing net entangement hazards, and a two foot long "Jersey Reel" full of biodegradable siscal rope strapped to him for a self-rescue contingency ascent line. And probably by his 3rd or 4th season, he could be out there diving those same wrecks with twins, diving deeper (still on air), doing penetrations and staged decompression stops. Does this sound like a dive profile that any of us would be comfortable taking a random modern OW+AOW graduate out on? If you're puckering, it is because our "Old, Non-Bold" (survivor) instincts are telling us that we're recognizing objective risks in the dive profile in addition to the uncertainty risk for the applicability of an OW+AOW graduate's training programs to have adequately minimized those risks.
Sure, we can say "Oh, he should go take Boat Specialty, Wreck Speciality, Low Viz & Currents Specialty....etc", or we can suggest that such diving is "extreme" and part ofTraining's CYA of "Local Conditions"...and so on. But the simpler truth is that twenty years ago, all of this special fussing wasn't considered necessary, because the OW graduate was adequately prepared, by being well-grounded in diving fundimentals and if not, a dozen dives with the mentoring dive buddy would do the rest. The classical saying that Instructors would close their courses out with was:
"If you can dive here (under these tough conditions), you can dive anywhere in the world!".
And while it is true that this sort of "local coldwater diving" experience development still occurs, but it isn't figuratively 90% of all divers like it used to be years ago, and it isn't contained within today's minimum standards anymore either.
By today's standards, some of the stuff that I was taught in my formal OW training from ~30 years ago probably sounds downright insane. For example, our classwork one day was literally to go calculate the dive plan and staged deco requirements for a 180fsw dive on air ... and after I finished, I asked why we would do such a thing, the Instructor's response was:
"This is the profile that you'll be doing on the "Texas Tower" a few years from now."
Yes, that's a dive instructor who was preparing his students for the relevant real-world local diving conditions...and what's different is that it didn't used to be an extra-cost Speciality, but simply expected...and also keep in mind that this was only an OW class. The best students in the class were approached to see if they were interested DM training as their next "Step Up".
My conclusions are that IMO, the comprehensiveness of dive training has declined, but we've been able to avoid being punished by it because we're taking lower risks ("easier" dives). However, diving can only be "dumbed down" to some TBD finite level of low risk ("easy") dives, so if training comprehensiveness were to continue to decline, we would inevitably reach a point where annual accident rates would clearly increase.
Unfortunately, it seems that no one considers the current rate of ~100 deaths/year to be a problem, and given market & business pressures, I'm afraid that "extra" people will have to die for several years before there is enough attention to recognize a problem and prompt a meaningful correction within the Industry to stabilize and restore balance. What's particularly disconcerting is that we may have already passed this "Houston, We Have A Problem" tipping point, but we are unable to recognize it because due to the downturn in the Economy which has certainly reduced the number of dives done per year: we need to remember that our "100 deaths/year" is a raw number that doesn't have the contextual insight of an actual incidence rate. Once again, not knowing exactly how many dives/year are actually performed limits our ability to assess what's really going on.
-hh
I did not say or in any way mean to imply that people have been berating anyone in this thread! 
