On average, how many dives does it take for someone to be comfortably self-sufficient?
(by that I mean, you can sufficiently navigate new sites, go wreck divings without being nervous, go night diving without getting lost, etc)
As people dive and gain both additional training and experience, their definition of competence changes. After many hundreds of dives and advanced instruction, they will look at their own past and decide they were incompetent when they only had about 400 dives and were teaching scuba classes.
But if we look at the definition presented in the opening post, I firmly believe that people who do a variety of dives and take the typical advanced classes early on will achieve that definition in far fewer than 100 dives. I believe I was well past that definition with about 30 dives.