If you accept the role of instructor you are forced to work with what you are given. Of course you can always choose not to be an instructor or to reject students. Seems a silly point to debate.
But again, you seem to miss the point. You believe instructors need more skill at the end point of experience (technical) while I argue they need more experience at the beginning point of experience (skin diving).
BOW divers do not need technical skills, they need basic water skills and those skills are first encountered skin diving. Familiarity, comfort, a sense of self, a sense of environment, a sense of ones place in that environment That is the foundation. From there basic diving is just understanding the physics of using compressed gas and extending the "swimming around" portion of the dive. Everything else is the same. None of it has anything to do with technical diving.
In fact, I would argue that interjecting technical aspects into basic diving makes that activity more dangerous. The safety record of BOW is built upon the premise of direct access to the surface. Every part of the training should emphasize that point. No overheads or extreme conditions, 50-60' depth, stay away from the NDL's, don't restrict your weight belt etc... If that concept is taught, and the skills to achieve it mastered, little can go wrong for BOW divers.
Add advanced skills, or technical skills, and you change that paradigm. You begin to have divers questioning whether they should stay at depth to solve problems (example the recent feathering valve debate), whether they should take on more challenging conditions etc... and not focusing on the primary skills of BOW diving. There is a time for that of course, when basic divers progress towards advanced diving and training, but that jump should not occur during initial BOW training.
Skin divers also tend not to bolt to the surface (they know they can achieve it via experience) tend not to engage environments they can not negotiate (through understanding their physical limits via experience) or panic on the surface (through knowing they can float easily there via experience).
Do basic divers not practice or retain BOW level skills? Yes, but not because they are always slackers. It is also because the BOW level instructor corp doesn't understand the foundation skills themselves. Many modern instructors have not skin dived, do not intrinsically understand neutral buoyancy and body presence or grasp the easy concept of moving from the surface - through the water column - and back to the surface, that it instills. Instead, as you suggest, many look towards technical skills/equipment to resolve an elementary deficit.
and yes all i did was reach back and turn it on and continued the dive. Distractions can happen either on shore or on the boat -- buddy system is good -- key is just like the HGTTG -- "Don't Panic" 
