Mike, I think you handled it just fine.
There are a lot of generalizations being thrown about group diving, signing waivers and such. In Hawaii, it's almost a local standard that dives are guided. There's no actual law, but everyone does it, and come lawsuit time if someone hurts themselves on a charter it's gonna come up. There was a case on Oahu 5-6 years or so ago where someone died, it was a guided dive, with a guide to customer ratio that was within accepted standards, all the appropriate waivers were signed, there was nothing apparently wrong with the equipment or way the dive was run, and a Coast Guard employee took the stand and said that in thier opinion, if there were more supervisors in the water with the deceased individual that fatality might not have occurred. End of case, the dive agency recommended settling immediately, the equipment manufacturers and the dive company settled out... and the Coast Guard is supposed to be the authority over boating activities, not diving.
People who feel they have special needs, including solo diving, no insta-buddies, how the gear is handled, etc, should inquire about how the dives are run before signing up. Group diving can be perfectly fine, even for experienced divers, if everyone plays by the same rules. In Hawaii, there are companies that will drop off divers off at the boat as they run low on air, not as the first person runs low on air, all's one has to do is find them. In my experience it's not the new divers that ruins dives for others as often as the divers who consider themselves so experienced that they don't need to play well with others that ruins more dives for everyone (I've had more people with hundreds to a thousand or more dives who's dives have been ruined by divers with 50-200 dives with an attitude than by newer divers). Sometimes all a guide can do is try to impart how they run the dive and hope the customers go along.
Most operators are pretty up front about how they run thier dives. If one signs up with them they should go by how the operator runs their dives and chalk it up to a lesson learned and not return if it turns out they aren't doing it the way the customer wants. Usually a few simple questions up front by the customer can avoid most misunderstandings.
