nineeightysix:
Are the NAUI and SSI programs/books as bad as PADI's?
First you need to remember what AOW is all about. It is exposure to different aspects of diving in a safe and supervised setting, for instance.....
*A deep dive will take you past the 60 foot recomended OW limit. Perhaps check for narcosis and sharpen some buddy skills. Don't expect any real gas planing, deco procedures or technical stuff.
*A wreck dive will bring you down to a wreck or debris field with the intention of swimming down to it, viewing it without entanglement and hopefully not disturbing it. It's not about penetration.
In many ways AOW is merely an extension of the OW certification though I believe that any diver uncomfortable in making modest shore or boat dives with an OW card has been let down by his or her instrructor. By cutting the program in two they can get divers into an entry level status that other wise due to time and $$ constraints would not be diving.
I did AOW with NAUI and had the same reaction after reading the book. In fact it was blatantly obvious that they were spoon feeding just enough information to cover the AOW objective while setting you up to take a specialty to learn the meat of the topic. Even in the Rescue diver class it seemed like most things were capped and it was pointed out that the rest was covered in the Advanced Rescue class.
The other side of it is that you need to consider the population as a whole. I am also a technical person. I had a pretty good bookshelf of instructional dive books that I had read and was at well over 100 dives when I did AOW. On top of that I had been a ScubaBoard junkie for a few years and believe it or not I'd say I have read more than I have posted. If you went out and bought the NOAA manual you are cut from the same cloth.
Contrast folks like us with the average non tecnical person who just wants to dive occasionaly, perhaps only on a once a year dive vacation and their objective is to see some fish while reveling in warm weightlessness. (Man that sounds nice in the middle of a freezing rain storm!) Many would not be willing and some not capable of dealing with an in depth tecnical treatment. There is nothing wrong with any of this but there is a very real distribution of intersts and abilities out there.
Frankly I do think it's all about the money. Another book package sale for the agency, another class fee for the LDS. Heck if it weren't for classes some divers would not be logging dives. I think once you cross over to a tecnical realm this gets a lot better but in the recreational realm it's pretty much the reality as I have seen it.
Pete