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I think you're misunderstanding what you're reading.
I personally know people with thousands of dives who are in no way more qualified than some who have only a couple hundred. Number of dives tells you less about a diver's qualifications than aptitude, mindset, training, and the breadth of experience. Someone with thousands of dives in a localized area are only experienced in that area ... and in many cases completely ignorant in others that someone with way less bottom time may be much more familiar with. Thousands of hours in open water in no way helps you navigate your way through a cave or inside a wreck. Experience in open water doesn't teach you how to anticipate problems commonly encountered in overheads, it doesn't teach you how to plan a dive below recreational depths or how to manage a deco schedule. It doesn't teach you why going deep on recreational equipment is a profoundly bad idea ... which is why it's so common to read about such diving attempts in the A&I forum.
A commonly heard mantra among untrained divers entering into caves is "I'm an instructor, I know what I'm doing" ... yeah, maybe in your familiar environment, but teaching Open Water classes in no way qualifies someone to enter an overhead environment, regardless of how many thousands of dives they have. It doesn't even help you deal with common problems encountered in a different recreational environment if you're unfamiliar with such things as surf entries, cold water, or downwellings (to name just three of many).
Your assertion that one of the biggest killers in tech diving is breathing the wrong gas is simply not supported by the facts. In cave diving the biggest killer ... by far ... is getting lost. It's not that you're breathing the wrong gas ... it's that you're going to run out of the gas you're breathing before you find your way out. Even if it's the "right" gas, you're going to die if you run out of it.
For recreational divers who are chasing depth, the most common cause of death is underestimating your ability to get there and back. Getting to your target depth is easy ... getting back to the surface is the hard part. Divers who haven't been to those depths often underestimate how quickly they'll go through their available gas at depth ... because while the mathematics are easy enough to figure out, the lack of experience belies their ability to understand the reality of actually doing the dive. Perhaps they fail to factor in how stress and narcosis changes your breathing rate and cause you to not just go through your gas faster than planned, but also induce other difficulties with things like buoyancy control or problem-solving that you thought you had "mastered". When it comes to "mastery", tech divers have a whole different definition for that term, and a large part of the training is learning why their recreational-level "mastery" of buoyancy, trim and propulsion are insufficient, and can get them into really bad situations unless they refine their skill or develop some new techniques. Skills that are perfectly acceptable, and even laudable for open-water applications simply aren't good enough.
The biggest difference between the mental approach to recreational training and tech training often boils down to this ... the former teaches you how to deal with the common risks while the latter emphasizes learning how to avoid putting yourself into a situation where you might have to. Sure, the tech diver learns how to deal with failures, but at a level that would cause most recreational students to quit. "Mastery" isn't the act of watching an instructor do something, and then repeating the action back to him. In a well-taught tech class your instructor is going to throw failure after failure at you, often multiple at a time or in rapid succession, until you find your breaking point. They're not going to tell you when it's coming, or which failure you're going to encounter ... it's going to be as close to "real life" as they can make it in the artificial environment that is a class. And you repeat the process over and over until you can handle multiple failures like they're no big whoop ... because your life depends on it. That's why so many people fail tech classes their first time through. And it's why the tech diver with only 200 dives will have experienced failures to a far more meaningful degree than the recreational diver with 5000 dives may have.
But while the tech training is more thorough, it is not necessarily the case that tech equipment, mindset, or training will make the recreational diver more safe ... in many cases the added task loading would make you less safe. Instead, focus on training that's specifically designed for the diving you're going to do. Choose a good instructor ... they're not as common as they should be, and that's unrelated to agency. Pay attention to the curriculum. Ask questions ... preferably those that begin with the word "why" ... because while knowing the "rules" is good, knowing why they matter is better, and if your instructor cannot explain the "why" to you in clear language, they're not really qualified to teach that class. That, unfortunately, is the most glaring shortcoming in recreational dive instruction ... instructors who lack the experience needed to understand the "why " of the curriculum. And again that boils down less to number of dives than it does a breadth of experience in different environments and circumstances.
Once you're done with class, pay attention to what you're doing ... there's a reason for everything they teach, and divers who take shortcuts are putting themselves at greater risk than they should be. Choose your dive buddies carefully ... there's more to being a buddy than just getting into the water with another diver and swimming around in their general vicinity. Develop your awareness ... putting on that mask eliminates your peripheral vision, and induces a sort of "tunnel-vision" mindset that causes people to make the most common mistake in recreational diving ... "assume". Don't assume. Develop a new habit ... the act of looking around you every few seconds to see what's going on that you might need to know about. Like the location of your buddy, the amount of gas in your tank, any obstacles you might want to avoid, or ... in way more cases than you might think ... that really cool pelagic or marine mammal that's checking you out (you'd be amazed how often I see people getting buzzed by a sea lion who tell me later they never saw it).
Fundamentally, everything you need to know to properly manage risks in a recreational setting is at least introduced in your OW class ... or the follow-on classes that focus on specific skills or environments. Yes, tech classes are more thorough. And yes, they introduce redundancies that can help reduce certain risks. But those additional skills and equipment management come at a cost ... and often the cost is greater than the benefit. Every choice you can make in scuba will come with benefits and drawbacks, and you need to be able to understand what they are and weigh one against the other to determine how best to manage your risks.
Experience isn't always the best measure in that respect ... someone with thousands of dives, and no experience in doubles will still have some degree of difficulty managing doubles when they first begin to use them. I remember well my first time in doubles ... I had nearly 1,000 dives by then, and I struggled more than a dive buddy at the time ... Lamont ... who had less than 50. Part of it was aptitude. A bigger part was that I had to "unlearn" certain habits that he hadn't learned yet. In this respect, experience didn't help ... in fact, it held me back. That's not an unusual problem in scuba for those who have become used to doing certain things in certain ways.
In summary, recreational divers who aspire to be good at what they do should focus less on what tech divers are doing, and more on what they were trained to do ... there is no such thing as complete "mastery" of skills ... there's just a continuum of improvement in both the physical and mental aspects of how you apply the skills you were introduced to in your training. Focus on what you were taught. And if risk mitigation is truly your goal, avoid environments you have not been trained in ... therein lie risks you may not even be able to imagine, much less are equipped to deal with. If you want to go there, do your research, find a qualified instructor, and take a class that will get you there safely.
Oh, and to answer your last question ... training doesn't make someone a good buddy ... attitude does. I've met some very experienced tech divers who make horrible dive buddies. And I've met some fairly inexperienced divers who make great ones. My current alpha buddy has less than 100 dives ... and I'd take him any day over some divers I know with thousands of hours and dozens of courses in their diving resume. Choose a dive buddy based not on their experience, but on their willingness to BE a dive buddy ... to think not in terms of "my" dive, but rather "our" dive. That's the guy who will be there for you if you should find yourself in a circumstance of need.
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
