Get yourself a standard octo and put a standard inflator on your bc. I have two shadows one I got when i purchased some used gear including a blizzard reg. I put my old octo from my sherwood brut on the blizzard and it's now my son's reg. The shadow went into the drawer. I also bought another reg for the first stage to set up a system for my argon bottle. It came with a shadow. This one I keep as a spare octo/lp hose in my save-a-dive kit along with the spg that was on it. The aqualung/us divers sea2 is in the drawer. My primary reg is an oceanic delta 3 w/swivel octo. there are two inflator hoses (bc and drysuit) and my console. I also have a sherwood brut reg with pony bottle guage for my pony. I also carry an lp hose for it in case I want to use my pony to inflate a lift bag with my blow gun which is more precise than using a second stage. Bottom line-none of my integrated regs are used for anything more than back-up. But a back-up is no good if you don't know how or when to use it. For this reason about once a month I put together a reg with the integrated back up and use it either in the pool or on one or two ow dives. And I practice using it everytime it's hooked up. But I'm fortunate enough to have enough gear to do this. I also have two bc's, two masks, two sets of fins, etc. Redundancy is a good thing. The only thing I'm looking for now is a cdx5 first stage with a DIN fitting. If anyone has one let me know. But traveling overseas I would want everything to be as simple as possible. Therfore a standard setup with nonintegrated octo would seem to be the best idea.
