CAPTAIN SINBAD
Contributor
It's a strategy to be 'different' and look cool to everyone else using this fraudulent system. That's my opinion and I have seen no real science to change my mind. In fact, in talking with DAN behind the scenes, they don't like it either. While the rest us, following tables or PDCs get bent so rarely as to DAN referring to these incidents as being mere "noise", it's not so with ratio deco divers. They get bent to the point of it being alarming to DAN.
To quote the venerable Dick Rutkowski who popularized NitrOx: "Science over Bullshite". If you can't produce the science, then don't feed me the BS.
To put this in perspective, I know of only 4 people who got bent diving within their NDLs. All of them were on Ratio Deco. All of them. None of them blame ratio deco... they blame themselves for not averaging correctly, making mental mistakes and what not. This is why PDCs are so good. They never get distracted from their one job of making sure you're not a DCS statistic. Within NDLs, they are amazingly effective. Get into deco and especially multiple days of deco and then things start to slide a bit. But not nearly as bad as Ratio Deco. I love you Kev, but that RD crap scares the bejesus out of me. I won't go there. I won't.
What I find interesting is that if you sit with the UTD community, they think that you and I are trying to look "cool" with our Perdix and Air integration computers etc. In their mind, theirs is the less glamorous and more practical style of diving than ours. We are the show offs! Outside UTD/DIR people tend to think that it is the DIR people who are trying to be "cool" (kool aid drinkers).
I like to be open minded. Presently there are four ways you can plan a dive.
1) Computers
2) Tables
3) Desktop software
4) Ratio Deco
Each of these have advantages in specific situations as well as disadvantages in specific situations. I think all of these add value to the other but I am not convinced that any of these really "replaces" the other. I also think that in order for form any opinion on any of the above, you really have to spend at least 10 dives diving with that particular method. It is only when you develop equal comfort / proficiency level with all of these that you can then be objective about which is more prone to "user errors."