DevonDiver
N/A
I respectfully disagree with this. Sure OW students don't absolutely need this skill to keep them safe, but there are more to protect then the divers themselves underwater. Bad finning techniques and no buoyancy control I observed in my dive trips, broke corals, disturbed sea creatures, kicked up silt in lava tube passage .... If we keep this up, the quality of underwater world will degrade.
I think you misunderstand. Good buoyancy is critical - that is why it is taught on every entry-level program. Of course, we can debate all day how well it is taught...
Specific techniques like frog-kick and helicopter turns aren't the be-all and end-all of good buoyancy. A diver can 'swim in a circle' without needing to helicopter turn on the spot. That technique has specific usage (confined areas).
Lets end this assumption that 'everything non-fundies is bad'... or that 'fundies is the only solution to bad diver buoyancy'.
The issue lies with quality of training and adherence to required performance standards - regardless of agency.
As you go on to say... good training is the product of good instructors. Technical qualified instructors are more likely to have a high standard of skills, more experience of instruction provision, more attention to detail and, generally, a higher level of expectation from students. The fact is that all GUE instructors are technical qualified, wheras all recreational agency instructors are not.
As for fail/pass, I do agree it to a point. Fundie isn't a walk in the park kind of class like PADI AOW. It requires student to work hard and commit, and failing is not too impossible. If you ask "I am only diving OW, why do I need those skill, why do I want to pay so much for another recreation level class? .... " then you are not likely to take fundie.
I think the fact is... only a tiny minority of diving students are willing to accept a pass/fail course criteria - when other, more guaranteed, alternatives exist. They pay their money, they want their card afterwards...
It's short-sighted, but reflective of human nature.
The benefit of being a small-scale, specialist, agency is that you can cater for a minority. A larger agency would bankrupt if it tried that. To effect change, on a major industry-wide basis, there'd have to be a unilateral shift to more exacting performance standards... with no option for 'an easy ride' being available elsewhere.