I am PADI OW and AOW certified. I am going to get my enriched air cert within the next month. I read threads on scubaboard often. I have seen the battles and the agency bashing. It is the instructor that counts. I looked around at different shops before I chose the one I ended up going to. After 4 years I am still going to the same shop. I did a tour of the shop, talked to the personnel and got a good feel for their capabilities even though I knew nothing about scuba training.
I am on scubaboard often. I often read posts of people that are PADI trained saying things like, "I wasn't taught that", "I didn't know that", "That was never mentioned in my class". In most cases I can go to the PADI OW manual and find the topic in the manual. If I think about it, all these things were covered in the class I took, or in the manual. I have come to the conclusion that getting certified is often not only what the instructor has taught but how much effort the student is willing to exert to learn the material presented.
It is difficult to teach people from all walks of life, with all kinds of different ways of actually learning something. In my case, internet based programs are not effective. I still need to learn the way that I was taught in my younger years, read the material, review it in a classroom, then practice it to put it into some semblance of a real application. I admit some are far more efficient at learning by reading it, I need to read it, ask question and apply it before it really sticks. Some learn by reading books, some learn by watching others, the rest learn by peeing on the electric fence for themselves. My point is that there are a lot of different approaches that can be used to teach, not everyone learns the same way.