You know, when you and I talk here (we don't do it often) we talk about two completely different divers. You talk about preparing a scientific diver and I talk about teaching the typical recreational diver.....
We shouldn't confuse the typical recreational vacation diver with the more avid divers who use diving as a tool in other pursuits or who spend a majority of their working and pleasure life under water. As I said earlier, the two are not the same.
Because the label of "recreational diver" and a frivolous reason for diving somehow confer a magical spell of protection from the various ways diving can harm/kill a person?
When a "recreational" diver panics, or screws up, is he any less dead than a pro, tech, or scientific diver?
I am constantly astounded by this distinction without a difference and the assumption that a reduced level of commitment somehow invokes the hand of God to protect a diver from all harm.
PADI (and Dive Sports) delivers the product that MOST want when they decide to do recreational diving.
And that's all that matters? The tobacco companies deliver what their customers want. Americans are dying in Iraq partially because the Hummer division of GM delivers what their customers want. Market economics is an amazing phenomenon, but it's morally neutral, and Adam Smith's theories assumed a far more informed consumer than the average person seeking entry level dive training.
The largest majority of people, when presented with an open water class of long duration, would decline.
And that's a problem only to a mercenary who sees diving only as a means to make money.
Remember, diving in only ONE of their pursuits.
Which means you're pursuing a market that will dive one, two times in their life, getting their "experience ticket" punched so they can say "been there, done that" when the subject comes up in the local meet market bar, who will never buy gear, and thus the mercenarism is focused on short term gain and not the long term health of the industry.
They are getting what they want.
Just like smokers, and suburbanites burning ten gallons of gas to drive their blingmobile to the local grocer, and guys like Eliot Spitzer at the Mayflower.
EACH which gives them opportunities to dive with the professional instructors who teach for me. That, alone, is good for them and sharpens their skills.
Actually, it's been my observation that continual diving with professional supervision after certification tends to foster a sense of dependency and delays taking responsibility for oneself. Why else would so many tropical charters no longer trust customers to assemble their own equipment?
There is good and there is bad. Agency has little, if nothing, to do with it.
Some agencies encourage more rigor, some actively discourage it, because, as you say, it's not what the target market wants.
But even that is not really my real concern. If PADI stayed the hell out of the institutions of higher learning, I’d sit back and say, yeah … “it’s a shame what’s happening, but that’s someone else’s problem.” 
