Even looking at Diver0001's scale, I'm still not sure how you define any of those categories. My Fundies instructor clearly thinks that anybody who is doing "advanced" diving is doing decompression dives or diving overheads.
But I went down yesterday with a man with thousands of dives in the PNW, under all kinds of conditions, and this man demonstrated a truly Uncle Pug-like joy and freedom underwater. He is absolutely at home there, and we talked after the dive about the milestones that divers achieve. He said an important one is the one where you realize that you're completely okay by yourself down there -- you can handle whatever the dive throws at you.
He doesn't do technical diving at all, but in the kind of diving he DOES, I'd call him an expert. So how do you define this sort of thing, anyway?
But I went down yesterday with a man with thousands of dives in the PNW, under all kinds of conditions, and this man demonstrated a truly Uncle Pug-like joy and freedom underwater. He is absolutely at home there, and we talked after the dive about the milestones that divers achieve. He said an important one is the one where you realize that you're completely okay by yourself down there -- you can handle whatever the dive throws at you.
He doesn't do technical diving at all, but in the kind of diving he DOES, I'd call him an expert. So how do you define this sort of thing, anyway?
isn't really.... The fact is, compared to Murphy and Mother Nature, we're *all* at a disadvantage. Every single one of us. Advanced divers are the ones who know this, respect the dangers of a particular dive in context of their own skills and experience and continue to "sharpen the saw" as it were, to keep the balance tilted in favor of surviving a particular dive. 
