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Cute, but what I described merely combined several required skills into a single exercise.

No, I'm pointing out a disconnect that is common to this debate. For 25 years, I've seen PADI defenders on this and other fora play semantic games with the difference between teaching, showing, exploring, and requiring performance as a gating event to certification. A training agency...

Some clarity is needed here. It appears there may be a semantic disconnect here between you and some of those with whom you contend, including beanojones and me. Please elaborate- you say "it was permissible to TEACH students while they are neutrally buoyant from the very beginning of the...

Now? I said I suspected from the start. Yes, I have cards from 4 different agencies, but not from 4 different shops/instructors. Our shop and instructors worked with multiple agencies. The instructor who certified me was PADI/NAUI/YMCA,and SSI. I also pointed out that I was far from...

No surprise there. No one's going to learn to use a drysuit unless they're going to dive in cold water, and there's a higher retention rate among cold water divers for both diving and continued dive training. Cold water diving is more challenging, so it attracts a different type of person.

There are shops/instructors in Ohio who offer a dry suit option for OW, and I bet any dive shop would give that option to an OW student willing to buy a dry suit. In addition, there are probably a lot of people diving dry without any certification. I was at a DUI Demo weekend at a local quarry...

In such places, dry suit training is part of OW. Also, a huge number of divers from cold climates never dive locally - they do their OW cert dives on a trip to the tropics either with the shop or via referral form, and if they keep diving, they travel toward the equator to do so.

My OW class was through a University Phys. Ed. department, and those in the class were classmates of mine for 4 years after that. None of them pursued further dive training in that time. In 20 years, I worked with hundreds of OW students and kept in touch with a lot of them. 80% of them...

Just 20 years of observations covering hundreds of OW students. I said it was my suspicion - what's your problem? Yes, from 4 different agencies - so what? Of what relevance is that? Where did I ever claim not to have more than one card? Where did I ever claim there's anything wrong with...

I base that on my observation from 20 years as a PADI member, and comparing the number of OW students versus AOW and above, not only at our shop, but at other shops in our town and other shops using quarries in our region. Further, since you're so fixated on links, according to this...

No, that's why I said suspect, rather than false. Through 20 years of PADI updates, they constantly hammered on getting more people to take con ed courses, a lot harder than one would expect if 1 out of 5 OW certs was going on to AOW. My own OW class had 20+ students, and I was the only one...

Ever hear the saying "Those who can't, teach" DM involves a completely different skill set than advanced diving. It's as much about communication and other people skills as it is about diving. As mentioned in this thread, there are DM's whose dive skills are atrocious, and there are very...

Pyramid schemes are misnamed. They should be called parabolic cone schemes. The top tier are basically the one percenters. And that 15-20% figure seems suspectfully optimistic to me. At the shops with which I'm familiar, about 2% went on to AOW. At PADI updates they were constantly saying...

Which contradicts the definition in the wiki. The wiki is worth exactly what you pay for it. No, their precision is a function of how square the profile is. The tables are like a math student who has not learned decimals or fractions, only integers. Ask him to take the square root of 10, and...

yes

Well, actually just one person - sorry for the verbal imprecision.

Just what percentage of PADI's revenue do you think comes from something other than OW students and member dues? I'd be surprised if it's more than 3% - pyramid schemes make their money off incoming bottom tier customers. You repeat the prior respondent's mistake of conflating the dive shop...

And what percentage of PADI OW certs go on to further certs? 2% if they're lucky. Pyramid schemes make all their money off fresh meat in the bottom tier. The number of certifications I have means nothing - I'm not normal.

They probably won't tell you, because then you could become a competitor

The year was originally thought to be 360 days.