I disagree that it is the basic protocol to jettison weights and return to the surface quickly once you get into trouble. That should be an option of last resort.
I would hate to have to spend time trying to find students' weights after they practiced jettisoning them in the quarry. Even if they tried dropping them right over the platform, they are likely to end up in the muck.
I think the reason most dead divers are recovered with weights still on them is because they aren't drowning cool, calm, and collected. They aren't reasonably thinking "I should drop my weights to get out of this, but then I would have to pay to replace them!" Since coroners like to short cut it and call any death underwater a scuba related drowning, we don't even know if they were dead before they could have realized something was wrong. A heart attack, a blackout, cardiac arrest, embolism, issues from an unknown PFO, could all happen before a diver or buddy, especially one who is not medically trained, knows what is happening.
And people can end up doing all kinds of weird things when they are narc'ed. You can argue they should have known better than to ever get themselves in that situation, but at the same time, you can't because they don't know what they don't know. Narcosis affects everyone differently and for some people, in as little as a foot difference of depth, you could go from completely rational and self aware to suicidal maniac, no longer in control of your own actions. There are deep diving students who, when presented with simple math problems on a slate at depth, will draw a picture of a dog to answer 2 + 1 = ? and then have no memory of you even showing them the slate when they get back to the surface.
I also really wish the training agencies would have chosen better names for things. OW should be Basic OW. AOW should be Slightly Less Basic OW or Intermediate Open Water. The media likes to latch on to things like "Oh, she was an advanced open water diver. She should have known better!" But really, no, she wasn't really that experienced, and may have been even less experienced in the conditions she was diving in.