There is no such thing as
recreational DCS.
Ongassing and offgassing are physical processes based on pressure differences, regardless of a dive being recreational, technical or commercial. The same laws apply. The biological part makes the straight-forward physical laws more difficult: different tissues behaving each in their own way and several of those tissues are dependent on the behaviour of other tissues. How the biological part behaves, depends on the person performing the dive, not on the type of dive.
If you want a good explanation of how gradient factors influence the gas model, watch
Dr. Neal Pollock - decompression stress, and
Simon Mitchell - decompression controversies. And read the book
Deco for Divers.
Really short explanation:
There's quite a bit of history leading to all this, starting at the beginning of the last century. Haldane used goats to determine when bubbles formed in different tissues. During the sixties, Workman used all this data and determined for each of those tissues a maximum value of gasloading. In the nineties, Bühlmann created a gasmodel with 16 compartments, simplifying all tissues in a mathematical way (a compartment does
not equal a tissue!). Each compartment has a different speed for ongassing and offgassing, and a Maximum-value of supersaturation.
So the idea was, that if you stayed below the M-value, no bubbles would form. Didn't work for everyone. New bright minds introduced the bubblemodel, which looked much better, with shorter decompression times. Didn't work for everyone either. Back to the gas model, but now with some modifications that makes the gasmodel behave a bit like a bubblemodel. Gradient Factors determine where your first stop will be and keep you away from that M-value in the original Bühlmann model.
Does this work for everyone? We don't know (yet). But science progresses, knowledge increases and several decompression specialists keep presenting new study results. Places like this board are perfect to discuss and criticize those results, sometimes in notorious ways.