I think that it should have been treated as a night dive. Every diver should have had a marker lights and other lights.
But maybe they did this.
We did have caylumes and torches. The torches are not very bright. As you can imagine, it's school gear, so it's not great quality stuff. A decent torch is next on my never ending list of stuff to purchase.
Unrelated to your question, I would wear gloves. If it's not cold enough for neoprene gloves, you can buy a pair of Atlas Fit gloves that don't offer thermal protection, but are tough and protect your fingers.
Outside of that, what these guys said. Kneeling on rusty metal is a bad idea. Not establishing neutral buoyancy is a bad idea. Doing a low-viz dive without the proper illumination is a bad idea. Wearing a 5mm wetsuit for a 60F dive to 100' seems like a poor choice depending on your endurance for cold.
I mainly dive in Sodwana Bay, which is warm water diving. Gloves are prohibited, so was never a thought. For quarry diving I am definitely going to get a set.
The water temp at around 10m/30ft was around 25c/77f. At the bottom it was 16c/60f. As bottom was planned at 8 minutes, I don't think anything more than a 5mm wetsuit is really needed. I just think the cold had quite an impact on how narc'ed I was.
Hope you don't mind me quoting like this. Don't want my post to get too long. As for your questions:
I am certified through Divetek South Africa. Their training is based on NAUI, but Divetek go into quite a bit more detail. I am very happy with the training I received and actually feel that the agency is charging way too little for what they provide. To give you an idea, for my AOW, we covered: Advanced Buoyancy (also got to play around in a harness) Dive Planning, Dive Leadership, Dive Tables and Computers, Regulator Design, Search and Recovery (including a host of search patterns), Drift Diving, Navigation (compass and natural), Night Diving, Deep Diving and Rescue Revision. Our dives were: night, deep, search & recovery, navigation (we did a bunch of dry runs on land, used a compass underwater and natural navigation) and some more rescue work. On the navigation and search & recovery dives, we used ropes, an SMB, lift bag and rescue sausage.
I am happy with my weight and we did recheck weight after each dive. To give you an idea, I am using a brand new 5mm wetsuit with 3kgs/6.6lbs of weight, very streamlined and low volume BC with a 10L AL cylinder. I am not overweight, but I am pretty tall (6ft), so I think my weight is almost spot on. I am purely responsible for being too overweight at the bottom. I was not putting enough air into my BC. I should have slowed the descent down until I was happy I was going to obtain neutral buoyancy close to the bottom.
My 4th dive was done in Sodwana Bay and that dive went down to a max depth of 21.5m/70ft, our average being 18m/60ft (viz was about 25m/82ft). I will never forget that dive as it was done on 7 Mile (apparently the best reef in SA) and was very blessed to snorkel with a whale shark. I never felt uncomfortable or out of control on that dive; although I will never know if I was narc'ed. I fully understand and appreciate the dangers of deep diving, and we have been constantly lectured about it at length. After what I experienced this weekend, I realize that I have quite a bit of experience to get before I even consider diving in Malta.
I have run out of time, so will respond to any other questions later.