Are you talking about the actual standards for the courses, or are you talking about what the individual instructor you knew did in his classes?Who are you? The class Sergeant at Arms?
My comment is just my personal opinion and based on personal experience. I became a PADI OWSI up here in the Seattle area in 1995. PADI was the only option for the shop I would be teaching from.
At that same time, my best friend was an instructor for the "other" big shop up here and their only option was NAUI.
Since we were great friends and loved teaching, we basically certified each other as DM's for the respective agencies so that we could help each other out with classes and still be within both agencies standards.
So having extensive experience with both PADI and NAUI Open Water courses at basically the same time, I quickly "became" of the personal opinion that the NAUI course standards were more complete, more thorough, more robust, more challenging and all in all....just a superior course whose standards produced more qualified and more prepared divers then the PADI course. I also very much liked that the NAUI program allowed more discretionary training from the instructors.... By that I mean drills and skills and challenges that are above the minimum standards.
I actually liked the NAUI program so much that I incorporated much of it into my PADI classes for our "fun time" .
My niece was NAUI certified after a couple hours in a pool and 1 OW dive to a maximum depth of 10 feet. Should I conclude that her class met all NAUI standards?
As for being the class Sergeant at Arms, I am simply sick and tired of people repeating old beliefs that have no basis in truth, and I generally step in and try to deal with actual facts. A lot of people do not like that about me. For example, you will regularly see rants about how PADI keeps continually lowering the standards for the courses, requiring students to do less and less. A couple years ago a guy who was saying that posted the course standards from about 30 years ago for comparison. That comparison showed that the only standard from 30 years ago that had been dropped was one regulator buddy breathing, and that was replaced by the alternate air source, which was not in the standards 30 years ago. We then identified (IIRC) 15 standards that PADI had added to the course since then. In summary, PADI has added to the old OW course over the decades, but people will regularly rant that the opposite is true.