The concept of a balanced rig, as I understand it, is that you need to be able to swim up a total wing failure, OR a total drysuit flood, but not both. If you are diving wet, you are in trouble if you are diving big steel tanks, because you only have your wing for buoyancy, and if it fails, you're down there super negative and unable to get back up. Which is why there is a strong recommendation for not diving heavy steels with wetsuits, and not diving deep in cold water in a wetsuit that can lose 20+ pounds of buoyancy with compression.
Kingpatzer, to address some of your points: JJ's book was written when there wasn't much DIR-compliant gear on the market. My understanding is that a big reason Halcyon was created was to fill that need. They have a lot of competition nowadays. No GUE instructor I've taken a class from cared what brand my gear was, although they may criticize specific features of it.
Second, nothing about DIR is unique -- people have been diving similar equipment configurations, using those gases, etc., for a long time. What's different about it is that it's a complete, prescribed system, and everybody trained within it can be expected to have predictable equipment, gases, and procedures. This makes it extremely nice, for example, to travel; I have met up with DIR divers in quite a few places, and although we have never dived together before, the experience is seamless.
With respect to the thing of not diving with other divers, there ARE procedures or equipment choices that are not good, although that's usually more in the context of higher risk dives. (And you have to realize that the guys who run this outfit and write the books and the articles are ALWAYS thinking in that context -- their universe is different from ours.) I wouldn't do a decompression dive, for example, with somebody on air. We can argue about that, and probably will, but to me, that's a risk I don't want to take. When you start doing higher risk stuff, having everybody on the same page gets much more important. We had a classmate in our Cave 2 who was trained before a lot of the protocols we use today were in use. As a result, when he was asked to deal with a failure, he didn't respond promptly and effectively. Mostly not a big deal on a 60 foot reef dive, but at 100 feet and back a thousand or more in a cave, you just need to get it right the first time, without stress.
I think many of us ARE "guilty" of doing the majority of our diving with similarly trained folks, simply because the system makes diving so easy. I read a ton of instabuddy dive reports here, and there are so often problems with staying together, or staying on the plan, or gas management . . . In Puget Sound, a lot of divers don't have any training in non-silting kicks, and diving with them means a lot of reduced visibility. I still do it, particularly with newer divers, because I want to share some of what I've learned. But for my own special fun dives? I'll get one of my regular buddies to go with me. It's not because I think other people are unsafe. It's because I have more fun with people with whom I can totally relax. (Now, there are several completely non-DIR people that I really enjoy diving with -- Charlie99 is one, gcbryan is another. But they have the skills.)
Anyway, we had 23 divers on the Channel Islands boat, and we dove four or five times a day for three days, in surge and current, sites that were unfamiliar to most of us. We sorted ourselves almost at random -- I dove with a bunch of different people, some of whom I'd never dived with before at all. There wasn't a single incident of any kind, except one team that got blown out of swimming range from the boat by current. Nobody got separated, nobody had a gas issue, nobody had problems with communication. When equipment failed (and, as you can imagine with that number of people and dives, it did) somebody else had a spare or something that would fit -- one of the big arguments for the standardized equipment! I think that trip was a really powerful testimonial to how good the system is. You can sure dive happily other ways, but this one works.
Kingpatzer, to address some of your points: JJ's book was written when there wasn't much DIR-compliant gear on the market. My understanding is that a big reason Halcyon was created was to fill that need. They have a lot of competition nowadays. No GUE instructor I've taken a class from cared what brand my gear was, although they may criticize specific features of it.
Second, nothing about DIR is unique -- people have been diving similar equipment configurations, using those gases, etc., for a long time. What's different about it is that it's a complete, prescribed system, and everybody trained within it can be expected to have predictable equipment, gases, and procedures. This makes it extremely nice, for example, to travel; I have met up with DIR divers in quite a few places, and although we have never dived together before, the experience is seamless.
With respect to the thing of not diving with other divers, there ARE procedures or equipment choices that are not good, although that's usually more in the context of higher risk dives. (And you have to realize that the guys who run this outfit and write the books and the articles are ALWAYS thinking in that context -- their universe is different from ours.) I wouldn't do a decompression dive, for example, with somebody on air. We can argue about that, and probably will, but to me, that's a risk I don't want to take. When you start doing higher risk stuff, having everybody on the same page gets much more important. We had a classmate in our Cave 2 who was trained before a lot of the protocols we use today were in use. As a result, when he was asked to deal with a failure, he didn't respond promptly and effectively. Mostly not a big deal on a 60 foot reef dive, but at 100 feet and back a thousand or more in a cave, you just need to get it right the first time, without stress.
I think many of us ARE "guilty" of doing the majority of our diving with similarly trained folks, simply because the system makes diving so easy. I read a ton of instabuddy dive reports here, and there are so often problems with staying together, or staying on the plan, or gas management . . . In Puget Sound, a lot of divers don't have any training in non-silting kicks, and diving with them means a lot of reduced visibility. I still do it, particularly with newer divers, because I want to share some of what I've learned. But for my own special fun dives? I'll get one of my regular buddies to go with me. It's not because I think other people are unsafe. It's because I have more fun with people with whom I can totally relax. (Now, there are several completely non-DIR people that I really enjoy diving with -- Charlie99 is one, gcbryan is another. But they have the skills.)
Anyway, we had 23 divers on the Channel Islands boat, and we dove four or five times a day for three days, in surge and current, sites that were unfamiliar to most of us. We sorted ourselves almost at random -- I dove with a bunch of different people, some of whom I'd never dived with before at all. There wasn't a single incident of any kind, except one team that got blown out of swimming range from the boat by current. Nobody got separated, nobody had a gas issue, nobody had problems with communication. When equipment failed (and, as you can imagine with that number of people and dives, it did) somebody else had a spare or something that would fit -- one of the big arguments for the standardized equipment! I think that trip was a really powerful testimonial to how good the system is. You can sure dive happily other ways, but this one works.
