I haven't made up my mind in either direction yet, but: I think this is fairly misleading if you're trying to compare it to the "standard" 8 days/16 dives Zero-to-Hero approach. I'm not sure what's involved in Technical Wreck, but it Deco50 is certainly not covered in Cavern->Full Cave progression. It seems like you'd actually be comparing 8days/16dives of Full Cave to 5days/8dives of Basic+Advanced Wreck.
It's not misleading.... it's just what it is.
Full Cave isn't comparable to basic+advanced wreck... it's much more than those courses. They are more aligned to cavern+intro-to-cave.
Basic wreck doesn't equate to anything in the caver curriculum. There's no cave equivalent of 'stay outside the cavern and look in only'. Basic wreck deals chiefly with wreck layout, survey, navigation and hazard awareness...along with introducing appropriate fundamental skills.
Advanced wreck is penetration focused. It refines fundamental skills, teaches guideline laying and retrieval, varied tie-offs and wraps, light and tactile communication, team roles, zero viz protocols, long hose air sharing, redundant gas systems and some contingency skills. It is, importantly, still a light-zone course.
The cave syllabus extends beyond Full Cave adding further linear distance and decompression, helium in a progressive flow of courses.
With technical wreck, you need to master technical diving as a prerequisite. This gets you to-and-from the wreck. Most wreck penetrations don't start at, or near, the surface. It also trains you in the equipment, team skills and protocols - stuff that has to be covered on a full cave course.
I think there's a disconnect in what some people assume is achieved in technical wreck penetrations. Probably because of limited wreck experience - not having dived bigger, complex penetration, wrecks...of which there are many.
I'll expand on that:
The linear distance may not be as substantial as some caves, but it's still easy to lay 400 to 800ft of line; working your way through multiple decks. This also invariably includes a number of restrictions, of varying severity, which impede progress and influence the time of the penetration.
Full cave level rarely involves passing significant restrictions - with technical wreck it's the norm. I don't mean 'door ways', I'm talking about tight ventilation shafts, engineering crawlspaces or partially collapsed sections that may require wriggling and squeezing through.
You can spend a lifetime doing wide, smooth, clean passages as a cave diver. If you struck to equal parameters as a technical wreck diver there wouldn't be anywhere much for you to explore.
Again, inexperienced wreck divers may observe a wreck and be convinced that there's no opportunity for penetration. A higher level wreck diver might see a myriad of opportunities on the same wreck.
Distance is less important than time. If you're 30 minutes from the exit with 25 minutes gas remaining, you're just as dead whether it's a wreck or a cave.
Technical wreck can include jumps, gaps etc. A team might lay several lines over a series of dives. Line marking can be important, on more complex and sophisticated wreck penetration dives. Penetrations may be reciprocal or traverse. Stage tanks, with appropriate procedures, may be used.
The ability to enjoy wreck and cave penetration is determined by the opportunities in a given area.
Florida and Mexico is a mecca for cave. They have a range of dives suitable for novice to expedition grade cave divers. The same areas, as people have highlighted, are sparse with major penetrable wrecks.
Subic Bay, Scapa Flow, Truk etc are meccas for wreck diving. They have a range of penetration opportunities for novice to extreme wreck divers.
But the same regions are sparce with caves...and even where there are caves, there may not be much spectrum of complexity: some areas only have very advanced systems, others only have very basic ones.
People who don't live/dive somewhere with an opportunity to dive at a given level shouldn't make assumptions that such diving doesn't occur elsewhere.
Just because you went on vacation somewhere for a week or two doesn't mean you were taken, or shown, the full extent of the diving available.
As an example, I've taken visiting Florida cave divers into the wrecks in Subic. They are challenging penetrations, for sure, and have caused some of those divers some stress. Nonetheless, those routes and areas were far less challenging than what the locally based, high-level, wreck divers undertake. They're basically the novice training routes... and that's entirely appropriate.
I'd fully expect the same approach exists in places like Florida or Mexico. People don't generally get to visit for a week, wave a cave card, and get taken into the most extreme areas.
There's a vast repository of info on cave diving... books, manuals, groups, forums, videos, reports, websites etc.
In contrast, technical wreck diving is much less visible and transparent. There are fewer resources and publications. The last major book was by Gary Gentile in the '80s...and technical wreck penetration has come a LONG way since then. It's a smaller, more niche, community. That sparsity of information easily leads observers into misunderstandings and false assumptions.
I'm not saying that someone can't have an opinion about technical wreck... people can learn valid knowledge without having a plastic card without the special initials on it... but the starting point for gaining that knowledge is for people to abandon what they 'think' they know, and start listening to what those involved and active in it are actually explaining.
