Purposefully running OOA at 100' was part on my diver training with the Navy and a prelude to doing a SCUBA doff and don in 100 FSW (which is more scary on the way back down than it is the emergency ascent). I know what you're saying Tom, but I can't help but think that Divers today are much too dependent on technology. If there's one thing that I've learned is that every piece of man-made equipment will fail in time (regardless of excellent maintenance). I even experienced a malfunction with a $8M Saturation System a few years back that almost cost the lives of 8 Divers. Divers should dive within their safe diving envelope (SDE). I believe more focus should be given on this during diver training.
I hear you and understand your point, however your experiance in Navy dive school was designed to be far safer than the average joe doing this deliberately. As you stated, you had safety divers, and probably briefed and debriefed multiple contingency plans. The statement Beanojones put out there was that people in this day and age, with no discernable support staff regularly plan and execute dives with no SPG and no J valve.......Knowing that they are going to run out of air. I would assume that if as a Navy diver today you were to execute a dive plan that way, you would be standing tall in front of the man in about 3 minutes. Nobody should condone this type of reckless behavior.
I completely understand the concept of performing these skills for training, but disagree with performing them on every dive just because you can. We have enough problems in this industry with divers getting killed due to stupidity or lack of fundamental skill sets, we dont need to re-enforce this type of behavior.