Although this sounds like a rhetorical question that should only be answered, “A bad message”, I decided to check AddHelium website, and they are all about serious preparation. In fact this article describes 8 months of preparation:
Add Helium Dive Team completes dive to 652 feet/200 meters
You mentioned Rob Stewart, who was not on a depth challenge dive, yet something went wrong anyway.
My take is that many divers have been lost, but we try to improve our safety strategies, and making educational videos about those strategies seems to be part of the industry.
Therefore the message he’s sending, is “get educated” I am not a rebreather owner, but if i was, ADDhelium WOULD be the people I’d go to to get training. Just because they challenge themselves to go to 200 meters does not mean I have to follow them down.
I have never said anything bad about Mr. Sotis, as I don't know him well enough to know anything bad about him. I've had dinner with him a number of times, I've been to his shop, I've met his staff, I've chartered my boat to him, and I've taken his clients diving. I am friends with some of his instructors. I am very good friends with one of his 200 meter divers, in fact, his first one, and I still consider her a good friend. She no longer dives, because it's dangerous.
Peter's problem is that he is the smartest man on the planet, and he will teach you to be as smart as he is. IMO, what he forgets is that we aren't all as physiologically capable of diving as he is. I know a number of other divers with the same issue, divers whose names you would recognize. Divers who dive 90/10 helitrox and set their dive computers to air. Divers who set their gradient factors to 90/90 in the face of all research. Divers who get away with with it because they aren't as prone to physical problems as a 325 lb man aged 55 might be.
I also consider some of the finest diving researchers in the world to be friends. Folks who have done research on my ship. Folks who have come up with data point after data point stating what the gradient factors should be. Who, after presenting their research to one of the largest and most popular dive computer manufacturers in the world, the manufacturer switched the default gradient factor to the researcher's recommendation.
It isn't that Peter is evil, or wants bad things to happen to his clients. Nothing could be further from the truth, dead clients don't spend money. Peter is sure he's right, and he applies his baseline to all of us. Maybe not all of us, he is convinced old fat men such as myself shouldn't be diving. And I haven't been as deep as Peter, but if there was a reason to go to 100 meters tomorrow, I wouldn't hesitate. In my experience, there isn't much left at 100 meters that I need to see. I would like to see the Ozark, and maybe I will. I do have my own boat. But the point is that Peter is like the dive operator that thinks he is just a taxi driver to the dive site and back. The world has moved on and left you, taxi driver. Now, boat captains need to be more than the guy who drives the boat to the site, calls roll, and drives the boat home again. Same for dive instructors. Peter isn't doing anything that commercial divers weren't doing 40 years ago. He's just doing it with a misunderstanding that sometimes things go wrong, and you need a comfortable margin from disaster to make the outcome right. He flies too close to the sun.
I have friends who teach for Peter. I would never, not in a million years, take a course from any one of them.