The problem is defining the term "superior". You've gotten a bunch of opinions here, from people who plan dives to people who don't do any planning at all. You've heard from folks who have discovered that computers (like tables, actually) can vary quite a bit in what they indicate for no-deco limits and how they penalize or reward you for time spent at intermediate depths. You've heard from folks who think that teaching tables gives divers a better understanding of nitrogen dynamics, and from folks who think that spending the time to understand compartment readouts (if your computer even has them) gives a better grasp of the idea.
In the end, there are two things: What keeps the incidence of DCS the lowest, and what gives divers the best intellectual understanding of the subject. The two are not necessarily related. DCS incidence is very low, and most of the cases are due to people egregiously violating either NDL time or ascent rate -- this is regardless of the table or computer algorithm being used. Deaths in recreational diving are RARELY due to the bends -- they are far more frequently due to embolism from panic or out-of-gas situations. So I think it is fair to say that, no matter what your understanding of your compression-management system is, the system works.
For those of us who want to have a better grasp of what the system is DOING, neither studying tables nor looking at computer readouts is going to do that, because both imply that we actually understand what is happening in the body . . . and we don't. To get a thorough picture of what your tables or computer are doing, you need to understand the basis for the table or readouts, and what the unknowns are. That's where a book like Deco for Divers comes in, or the GUE DVD, The Mysterious Malady. There are also a lot of resources on line, like Erik Baker's paper, "Understanding M-values", which is available on many sites.
In the end, there are two things: What keeps the incidence of DCS the lowest, and what gives divers the best intellectual understanding of the subject. The two are not necessarily related. DCS incidence is very low, and most of the cases are due to people egregiously violating either NDL time or ascent rate -- this is regardless of the table or computer algorithm being used. Deaths in recreational diving are RARELY due to the bends -- they are far more frequently due to embolism from panic or out-of-gas situations. So I think it is fair to say that, no matter what your understanding of your compression-management system is, the system works.
For those of us who want to have a better grasp of what the system is DOING, neither studying tables nor looking at computer readouts is going to do that, because both imply that we actually understand what is happening in the body . . . and we don't. To get a thorough picture of what your tables or computer are doing, you need to understand the basis for the table or readouts, and what the unknowns are. That's where a book like Deco for Divers comes in, or the GUE DVD, The Mysterious Malady. There are also a lot of resources on line, like Erik Baker's paper, "Understanding M-values", which is available on many sites.
