Since a comment I made was the stimulus for the thread, apparently, and lots of people have responded with lots of thoughts, I will throw my reaction in to the conversation.
If OW was not the hardest course a diver does (in term of getting actually getting from place A to place B), then there is something wrong with the OW instructor. Every other course adds such minor additional skills to OW that any instructor who designs his course to be 'harder' than OW is simply doing it wrong. As are instructors who design their OW course to be 'hard', because with thoughtful sequencing, and laser focus on the water work by the instructor, it too can be simple for the divers to move a great distance from the beginning to the end of the course
That being said, I certainly do not think OW students should ever think of their OW course as 'hard' from their perspective. They (should) get from place A to place B with little awareness in the change of their skill and comfort level. This is possible in any course where water work (which is all diving is anyway) is emphasized over everything else, even to nearly the point of exclusion of anything but water work. (Instructor love to talk to much, so it will ever happen that no lectures and briefings will take place. We just cannot help ourselves; we are so awesome for becoming instructors.)
The water is the only place where learning about diving actually counts for anything. Few people find successfully being guided in physical activity frustrating. Unfortunately, it is apparent that many instructors simple have not focused on, and do not focus enough on, a student's in water behavior to know how to guide students to success in the water. We are all taught how to evaluate whether a goal is reached, but it is becoming apparent to me that many instructors simply do not know how to put students in to a situation where sticking points become apparent, and do not know how to find and correct the tiny details that are the actual source of the greater problems that are more easily seen. It is easy to say "you must be in trim, and float motionless"; it takes laser focus to find the tiny details that keep people from doing it as a matter of course (head angle, ankle angle, shoulder to hand motions). Same with kick problems: they are not about the kick, but about the balance (or more correctly the lack of balance) that the person with the odd kick is feeling.
Everyone finds being lectured about physical behavior (to some extent) frustrating because it is pointless to know what to do if knowing how to do it is not in place. Once knowing how to do it is in place, then lecturing about it is mostly pointless. Physical paractice is all that matters. In either case, lectures waste time, at least if the goal is the doing. (If physical performance is not the goal, then someone, either the instructor or the student, is vastly mistaken about what diving is.)
Lectures are sometimes a necessary evil, but, since the instructors are usually just repeating the goal again and again, rather then the path of how to get there (apparently since they do not actually know how to get there anyway), the lectures are rarely of real value of to the student having difficulty. Everyone knows the goal. It is clear that many students are unsure of how to get there.
What is increasingly clear is that many instructors are also unsure of how to take students there efficiently, and effectively. Thus 'hard' classes. Not because the goal is so difficult to reach, but because few instructors have a map on how to get there, and have to keep wandering the countryside to reach the inn for the night. Such instructors have to extend classes, so that with enough bumbling around students can reach the inn by themselves. Of course that is not the result of the instructor's tuition, just the student's experience. Thus a 'Hard' class; not because of the distance traveled, but because of the meandering path taken. Some students can walk straight to the inn; others don't know the way, both sets of students end up frustrated, as does the instructor. But who is really at fault here? The student who does not know the way, and actually needs the class, or the instructor who lets blame fall on that student instead of shouldering the blame? The answer is crystal clear to an instructor with empathy.
Instructors who want to talk a lot in lecture or briefing will always make the simple thing hard because quite simply the only thing that matters for diving is correct water behavior, and some instructors pour their effort into lectures and briefings, parts of the course which do not benefit the student. It just benefits the instructor's ego since he/she gets students marvelling at her/his depth of knowledge and experience. The instructor ends up frustrated with students who 'do not listen', and students end up frustrated by their own inability to 'do what they are told'. But the instructor does get students to idolize her/him.
But this is the problem with trying to talk people into physical behavior: It's a waste of time on both ends. It is not a waste of time if the instructor is interested in the ego stroke though (for the instructor, for the course or for the agency). Unfortunately many instructors are happy to develop their own reputation (or the course's reputation, or the agency's reputation) at the expense of a diver's tuition. Some instructors seem to be unaware that they are doing it. Others are well aware that they are doing so, rationalizing that it is good for business to have divers marvelling at the instructor (or course or agency) over marvelling at the activity of diving itself. This is not a slam at GUE or Fundies, but since that is the hallmark case, it is worth pointing out that the cult of that class is more important than the diving that follows from it.
People, whether instructors or students have a limited window of top concentration. By demanding concentration away from the water, they are guaranteeing that second rate effort is put into the most important thing: the in-water work. By expending student's effort away from the water they are getting tired students in the water. By expending their own effort and concentration in briefings, they are not lasering their focus on the students actions in the water. Again, the GUE OW course was an example of that. No need to repeat those comments here, but succinctly: Details were missed, which is well nigh inexcusable in a 10 day course.
Of course both the student and instructor find such a course 'hard': It's pushing on the wrong end of the bicycle, and effort thus expended only sometimes comes to fruition. Thus, hard. It's not efficient or particularly effective, just hard. One of the problems with extended courses is that if divers spend enough time doing anything long enough they will figure it out, even without an instructor's presence. Of course, their success in that case is hardly due to the efforts of the instructor, just a function of enough inefficient effort being put into something over a long enough period of time to reach the goal eventually. Few instructors of extended courses seem to keep that in mind though, and are happy to take the credit for something they have little to do with.
As a particular cogent non-GUE example of how instructor's do not focus into the details of the water-work and get stuff wrong, and make classes from the student's perspective hard, I see PADI Rescue Classes taught all the time to student divers who have to spend all their time at the surface struggling to maintain their pose, because most divers are not set up to float comfortably vertical at the surface. At the end of a half day, these students are worn out by the extraneous effort that the instructor simply fails to register and correct, because that instructor has focused herself/himself on the instructor stuff (briefing, skills in the class) instead of focusing on the student's in water behavior in total. Why does an instructor miss such important details? Because people have a limited level of focus and concentration available, and they have already expended on stuff other than the students in water bahvior.
Ask ten people who have taken Rescue Class about it, and five will say it was a 'hard' course, and it was exhausting. Those five will be the ones who could not get still on the surface, and did not have the instructor focused on their in -water behavior. Of course it is exhausting if the instructor does not laser focus on the details, because the instructor lets the student expend fruitless effort, because the instructor is not focused on the student but rather the instructor stuff (lectures, briefings, etc.). Moreover, the exhausted student does not internalize the course content well, and because of the discomfort during the course will not carry a level of confidence about the course activities forward into the real world of diving.
Though it starts as an argument about the instructor focuses on the wrong stuff, it becomes a point about where the student ends up. As I have said many times before, all an instructor really needs is empathy. With empathy, they will learn something from every class, and get better at teaching because they will only care about results, and not the ego stroke of teaching. Without it, they will just become more and more disconnected from students, and they will end up only wanting to teach tech diving to experienced divers because they will find teaching anything else frustrating. Of course teaching tech diving is simple because the entrance requirements mean that only students who have very little to learn will show up.
