I will share with you my experience with AOW, you can draw your own conclusions from it. I have done my AOW right after OW, my very first dive after getting OW certified was a dive to an airplane wreck at ~115 feet. My thinking at that time was that, AOW was a great way to get more experience under a watchful eye of an instructor. My instructor claimed he had a few thousands of dives of experience, he was a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer, it sounded like he was making his living teaching, and I trusted that I would be perfectly safe with him.
Here's how my dive actually went. My instructor was probably somewhere within 30 feet at all times, but he got busy with other divers, I think there were 4 of us down, and I don't think he really paid much attention to me individually. Perhaps he concluded that I knew what I was doing because I got certified on Long Island, or whatever. I was quite freaked out, and task loaded, my breathing was very noticeably elevated, even though I didn't think I was too anxious or uncomfortable, it just seemed like the way things were supposed to naturally take their course. I eventually ran down to I don't remember what, but less than 500 psi, before I noticed that I needed to ascend. I did not panic, but I wasn't exactly able to think clearly, either, my knee jerk reaction was to head for the ascent line. I started to ascend, soon to realize that I did not have enough for the safety stop. Not realizing that I could simply skip the stop, I made another decision without thinking, to head back down, to grab a diver to demand air from. After I met with a diver, and signaled OOA, the person seemed startled, and didn't at first register what I wanted from him. I don't remember how long it took, and whether he first gave me the regulator, or whether I took it from him, that part is fuzzy. We went up together. I have not seen my instructor until I was back on the boat. AFAIK, nobody else seemed to even care much to comment on this, my insta-buddy and I concluded that it was a great learning experience. No doubt it was, I certainly have become instantly better at gas management after that dive, but thinking back, it surely seems like a complete cluster****... and with a few incompetent divers in the water, and only one instructor, the outcome of that AOW could have been different.
Now, with the AOW cert in my pocket, once back home, I gained access to local wreck diving. I eventually headed out for a dive with my local dive shop, again falsely assuming that with the help of the dive shop staff (some of whom claimed to have done the Doria), I would be somehow safer. On one of my first local wreck dives, I believe it was dive #20, to just shy of 70 feet, so not particularly deep, my pair of insta-buddies abandoned me, because I was taking too long to descend (or maybe they thought I would catch up with them, neither tried to stay within a visual distance). After realizing that I was alone, once at the bottom, I took a few minutes to calm down, and in the hope my buddies would show up, and since I was already there, on my own, and with my trusty 30 cuft pony, I decided to not rush back up, and to instead execute my first official solo dive, by swimming within 10-15 feet of the anchor until my buddies return. This was also a fantastic learning experience, I learned pretty early on about equipment task loading (first time with a pony), buddy separation, and a bunch of other things, but looking back this dive was definitely a major cluster**** as well.
