Although PADI AOW seemed almost pointless to me ("Advanced"?--really?),
No, not really....
It is
Advanced Open Water.
The course serves to give you a bit more supervised experience before letting you lose on the oceans, and increases your awareness of the breadth of activities available for you to investigate - once the simple thrill of being underwater and seeing 'stuff' wears off. A good instructor will use it as a vehicle to create some good skill progression also....
PADI Rescue Diver was a great decision. My course was a fairly intense 4 days (including the EFR/First Aid course), and we practiced and practiced our skills. We were constantly in and out of the water and worn out by the end. By learning how to help others, I became much more confident in being able to help myself, which to me is even more important.
Every diver
should get to rescue level. That is the first level where a diver is truly proficient and independant (in respect of safety).
Anyway, this leads to the question that I asked myself of whether I wanted to continue on to Divemaster. I had no ambitions to lead groups of divers professionally, which is what a DM does.
It doesn't mean you have to lead divers
professionally. I gained a great deal of enjoyment as a qualified DM simply from being the person that organized and led diving trips for my friends.
Certainly, in areas where you will generally dive without professional supervision (independant shore dives and boat charters), this this course would improve your capacity to jump into the water and look after less experienced buddies (not customers).
After literally a couple of years of deliberation, I just couldn't think of a good reason to take the DM course. Poor reasons included personal satisfaction--an achievement to pat myself on the back for. But I realized that I could use the money that would have been spent on the course to further my diving in other ways. I could simply do some more dives. I could buy books through which I could increase my technical knowledge. As others have remarked on this thread, a tech diving course would probably teach things that would be useful to any diver.
Gaining experience through diving itself should never be underestimated. Time spent in the water always pays off. However, time spent in the water where you are mentored, appraised and critiqued is especially beneficial....and this is what you get from a good instructor on a DM program.
You can get simular benefits from a Tech Course, but the timescales are shorter. Unless you continue diving with your tech 'mentor' then the long-term development benefits are not there. However, the greatest benefit of tech training is that it stretches your comfort zone, greatly increases awareness and provides a mindset of precision and personal responsibility that is often lacking greatly within recreational dive training.
Of course, Tech training is not for everyone...is expensive...and requires a high standard of basic diving ability as a prerequisite. Doing a Tech course for the wrong reasons and at the wrong time would be a costly and overly stressful experience.
Lastly, I wondered whether being labeled a "Divemaster" might give others the impression that I am more experienced than I am. Unless one is in the water every day as a professional DM, one isn't going to rack up the number of dives that I tend to think of a "divemaster" as typically having. I don't really have that many dives under my belt, and it doesn't seem to my advantage to have others think that I dive all the time.
That really is a matter of perspective. I think seasoned divers understand that a newly qualifed or non-working DM is not the same beast as a diver whose regular daily routine is 4+ dives a day.
The same 'over-expectation' could be applied to someone carrying a tech certification, or even a
fundies card.
