Like Bowlofpetunias said, I am literally using new equipment every time I dive.
I've been doing the same thing for 15 years, all I take with me on a vacation dive trip is mask & fins (and sometimes not even fins), a dive computer and my safety gear, sometimes my own wet suit, some times I rent that along with everything else.
Once you are a dialed in diver, it's not a big deal to be renting equipment, basically it's all the same, or you'll eventually see most of everything sooner or later, its not like you're suddenly renting a dry suit where all you've used in a wet suit, or suddenly going to be renting doubles instead of a single tank, or a back plate instead of a BC. The biggest difference you will find in BCs is integrated weights, and even if you get a rental BC with intergrated weights, there is nothing stopping you from not using them and just grabbing a weight belt if you wanted to. With experience you learn to what look for with rental gear and you can do a quick safety check of most of it in less than 2 minutes and spot any issues before you ever get on the boat, and then if you're doing multiple day dives you'll probably be diving the same gear for the whole week, so once you have your new rental gear squared away, you know what you're getting day after day.
One small thing you can do to put rentals in your favor is simply to only dive with the best dive shops in a given dive destination, they keep their gear in excellent condition and buy new gear frequently so you're not likely getting crap gear in the first place and sometimes you're ending up with better gear than you might own anyways depending upon how old your gear is.
---------- Post added March 2nd, 2014 at 10:01 AM ----------
I think raising the standards would create a higher fail rate on scuba courses and may adversely affect scubas (apparently declining??) popularity. = less customers for scuba shops and certification agencies. Just a thought.
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It's already done and over with if you're talking about PADI, who has started the process of implementing many new higher standards to the OW course, the list of what they are changing and adding is pretty much a laundry list of everything that gets discussed on SB about what needs to be changed.