Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
Since 2007 BSAC have included Nitrox within core training for Ocean Diver and Sports Diver certifications.
Again, it depends ... where I live, nitrox is as easy to get as air. Sure, it's a bit more expensive ... but typical profiles here make it easy to do dives that average between 20-30m. If you want to get a reasonably long dive then the added expense is worth it.
It might surprise you to learn that PADI doesn't, in fact, make every decision there is to make in diving. In fact, of the two dozen or so C-cards I've collected, not a single one is PADI. They have absolutely no influence over my diving choices.
There are very good reasons why making trimix available to typical recreational divers is a bad idea ... the most obvious being cost. If you're complaining about a $10 nitrox fill, imagine how you're gonna feel when you go get a 21/35 fill in a set of doubles and the bill comes to $80-$100. A more practical reason, however, is that helium ongasses and offgasses MUCH faster than nitrogen ... and people with questionable buoyancy control can bend themselves fairly easily breathing helium. It's "privileged for the Tec community" because it's generally assumed that by the time you get to that level you'll have solid buoyancy skills, and be able to hold the stops where and when the profile calls for it ... because you HAVE to. Blowing a safety stop on a recreational dive might increase the risk of DCS, but it generally doesn't result in a hit. Blowing a deco stop on trimix usually will. No dive shop in their right mind is going to risk that kind of liability on the assumption that a typical recreational diver will have either the chops or the self-discipline to manage mandatory stops.
