I think that the travesty arises when students are woefully mislead into thinking that they are receiving training equivalent to another agency. I've seen this when you see the contradiction between how these poor students say they have been trained versus how they perform when underwater. I know that GUE instructors go through a fairly scrutinizing process in their IDC and IE. I do strongly believe that it is in the details which sets the quality of their classes apart from an average Joe like myself showing someone some skills. For instance, my GUE-trained dive mentors and buddies could show me the concepts and techniques, but they all HIGHLY recommended that I take GUE-Fundamentals as there were likely details and nuances I was missing by not receiving the formal training from a certified instructor. Boy were they right. Even after diving the system a year with buddies, the formal classes polished and taught me so many aspects of my diving as well as providing me a better blueprint and goal for continuing to train and improve myself along a particular pathway.
Like I said earlier, if you want Chinese food, don't go to a Mexican restaurant. Different instructors teach different dive philosophies. I don't think that one is necessarily better than the other, they're just different, and you have to select what works best for your purposes. I've pretty much only had two very different training agencies instruct me: LA County and GUE. Both were great, and I really appreciate aspects of both. I wouldn't go to LA County seeking GUE training, and I wouldn't go to GUE seeking LA County training. I would also be sorely disappointed if my instructors in each of the respective agencies were to misrepresent themselves teaching equivalent training of the other, and I am glad that they do not.
FWIW, I also hate the term DIR. I don't really even know what that means, and I know that I don't always do everything right. I'm pretty far from perfect underwater.
