There is simply an enormous amount of information out there, and there is no one real source that can help you. That happens in the non-scuba world, too. I recently bought a new mattress. I looked first at Consumer Reports, and it was not at all helpful. Tons of information, but no meaningful way to sort it all. I then looked at other rating sites and, again, found too much information from too many sources. I finally walked away from all of them, went to a bunch of stores, talked to a bunch of people, and made my own decision.
If you walk into a mattress store, the sales people will of course recommend the mattresses that they sell. The same is true of scuba shops. They will tell you to buy what is in their shop, but they will also go beyond that. I stopped working at a shop right as it was changing its agency affiliation and after the head of that agency taught them they would make more money by identifying the model in each equipment category that had the best markup and doing everything they could to steer buyers to those models. That process included making sure all the instructors were decked out in those items and only those items, and having the instructors tell their students that they used that equipment because it was the best.
This is ScubaBoard, so you have gotten recommendations to by a backplate and wing with a long hose setup. In the real world of scuba, that is an extremely rare configuration. If you go to almost any of the shops in my area, not only will they not recommend it, they really won't know what it is. It will not be on display because they do not stock it. They would not know how to set it up for you if you ordered one. It is what I use, though, and it is indeed what I think is best. When I took it to Australia and used it on a dive boat, the crew had never seen anything like it and wondered aloud why I would use something as strange as that.
Beware of zealots, the ones trying to cram things down your throat. There is a cliché about an organization who pushed and pushed for everyone at any level to use the same equipment, and that cliché was that they were always saying "You're gonna die!" if you don't use their recommended equipment. They actually had an individual whose specific job it was to lead the movement to get everyone to dive the way they did and with the equipment they used, and
here is one of the items he wrote telling people how to do that. It is far more polite than usual, with the strongest language being the part where he says, "Try to dive only with people you know are safe, and who dive the same procedures and configurations you do. If you are "stuck" with someone you see gearing up badly, with a poor configuration, try a good natured explanation of why the "Doing it Right" system would have him/her configured differently." In more usual and less carefully constructed posting, he was very much of the "You're going to die!" ilk. For example, in a ScubaBoard thread a few years ago, he said that all over the world, drysuit divers who are not trained by the agency he was promoting were dying because they lost buoyancy control and had uncontrolled upside down ascents, leaving them at the surface, dangling from their overinflated legs.
So, take your time. Do a lot of reading. Decide whom to listen to. Make a good choice.
