Walter:If what you report is true, then it's instructors making up for an agency short coming.
Not having experience with different diving agencies, I can't comment on any others, but I would hope any instructor would make up for any shortcomings in any agency. I realize that's probably not the case, but that's what I would hope for.
The closest I can come to a training comparison is my basic flight training. My first instructor went through everything in the syllabus methodicaly, checking all the boxes, dotting all the "i's" and crossing all the "t's". At that point he could have signed me off the take the FAA flight check, and I would have been a "Pilot". Instead he said, " Now that we have all that crap out of the way, let's go learn to fly." Another 20 hours of real world.
That's kind of the way I feel about my dive training, learned what was in the book, learned some real world too.