ocd, why are you attempting to make this about me? There are numerous valid perspectives, and your effort at casting my posts in some kind of negative light to invalidate them is rather ironic.
To begin with, my posts most emphatically do not come from a "moneyed tourist" perspective. They come from the perspective of someone who has lived, worked, and traveled extensively in the region for over a decade and in addition who has helped hundreds of others organize their visits here, getting feedback from all of them. My customers range from backpacking students to those who are looking for pampering. You quite simply don't know what you're talking about as far as my perspective goes. I will say it again: in my experience, there are things about Indonesia travel that are worth paying for and things that are not. Booking domestic air travel in Indonesia through an air ticket booking agent is one of those things that are worth paying a small commission for if you don't have on-site assistance of your own.
Next, as many times as you have been in the area (and I realize that you've been here much more often than most and style yourself as something of an Indonesia expert), your individual experience, while valid and valuable, is far, far less than my own personal experience (in which I am most often on a budget), even without considering the additional insights gained through my professional experience. For you to suggest that my posts are somehow "skewed" (to use your derogatory phrasing), and further, your disparaging distinction between "moneyed tourists" and "budget travelers rather than tourists" appears to be an attempt at undermining the validity of my "perspective" and suggesting that anybody who isn't like you isn't a real "traveler." There is no need to cast such aspersions in order to support your advice.
Finally, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that only people who are unconcerned about the costs of dive travel can afford to use the services of a travel consultant and that everybody else can do better on their own. The truth of the matter (and perhaps your ignorance of the facts is due to lack of experience) is that it costs no more to book through a travel consultant than it does to book directly. Travel consultants have a much broader and more up-to-date store of information at their disposal than can be cobbled together through the patchwork individual experiences of visitors like you whose reports are scattered all over the internet, no matter how enlightening these individual reports may be. What I typically do is offer several suggestions to my divers and recommend that they read reports like yours in order to help them choose which option best meets their needs.
Any commissions that air ticket booking agents apply are theirs alone and are not shared with travel consultants (here in Thailand, the ticketing agents I use for my customers charge a whopping $2.00 per ticket), so there's simply nothing to substantiate your implication that I have some vested interest in suggesting to my divers that they use local agents for Indonesia domestic air ticket bookings. If they don't want to (gee, for example, never wants to and always does his own air ticket bookings), it's no skin off my nose.
I have yet to work with any diver who has said "money is no object." There are smart ways to spend in order to get good value and imprudent ways to save in order to economise. The trick is to know which is which.