I have seen this revisionism before and ignored it.I was actually told that I was a liar by one of the people you mentioned in that letter to PADI when I first revealed that I was not allowing my students to kneel a year or two earlier. They wanted to know "HOW" I taught a certain skill and apparently I didn't give them the answer they wanted.
The earliest discussions were in the Instructor to Instructor forum. I was then an advocate of instructing on the knees, and there were only a couple people advocating neutrally buoyant instruction. One individual poster got me thinking about it--Walter. That is when I began experimenting with it, and I carefully surveyed all other posters talking about technique, looking for clues as to how to do it. There weren't many. When I finally decided that I wanted to submit an article to PADI, I gathered every single person I could think of on ScubaBoard (and elsewhere) who had shown any inkling of interest in this except Walter, who could not be part of it because of his open hatred of PADI. I created a discussion group on The Dive Matrix so I could avoid certain negative people on ScubaBoard who would have sabotaged the entire effort.
As I wrote in a PM to you well after the article was published, I did not include you in the group because I didn't have the faintest clue that you taught students while buoyant. I have no memory of you giving any indication of it in the early discussions. If I had known that, you would have certainly been included, and I would have asked you to create a special forum in ScubaBoard where we could discuss instead of going to an outside site.
Well after the article was published, and after the outrageously combative discussions that followed were over, you wrote that you started students in mid water from the very beginning rather than with fins lightly touching as the rest of s did. Lots of people had trouble imagining how that was possible, and you were asked for a step-by-step description of how you reach that point with brand new students. I was one of those asking--I could not see how I could start that way. It took a lot of pleading, but you eventually described that instructional practice in more detail. I am sure that is what you are remembering when you tell everyone over and over and over again that you were the only instructor doing it and that everyone else was doubting you. and were finally won over to your idea. You just have the timeline wrong. (Of course, all you have to do is to link to those discussions to prove me wrong.)
All of the ScubaBoard people who were part of that are gone now. (There is one exception, someone who was part of the discussion but did not want to be named in the article for fear of repercussions from his dive shop.) Two are, very sadly, deceased. I do not consider myself to be part of ScubaBoard, either. I came back for this discussion because it is so important to me, but I pretty much stopped participating last may when you told me I was an embarrassment to ScubaBoard and made it clear that as far as you were concerned, ScubaBoard would be happy to see me go. So I left. With no one who knows any better around any more, you can go on presenting yourself as the God of neutral buoyancy instruction, the lone prophet who led the way out of the wilderness.