Scubacat8, I've run into just about everyone of those folk you refer to but not all were on liveaboards. Some of those I've met were on land at exotic liveaboards. Generally though, in those sorts of places the divers, even the serious photographers with their own books and such haven't built their own scuba gear . . .perhaps their own camera systems! And I will forever be grateful to Burt Jones and Maureen Shimlock whom I met at Sipidan's Borneo Divers Resort, so many moons ago, for turning me onto Lycra scuba socks, at a time when my feet had become bootie-related hamburger.
I'll always laugh when I think of the 20 something boys from Cape Town South Africa. For the first few days they had the "eyes in the headlights" look of shock and horror to have found themselves on the Dewi Nusantara with bunch of old fogeys. But it didn't take much time before everyone was loving on each other.
I'm sure those 2 young men would still prefer to spend that much close contact time with people closer to their own age but now they know better than to be horrified, right out of the gate. Omg, the laughs we all had together playing games and telling jokes until bed. Of course, no one was calling anyone "cockroach" either, so there's that.
Really, it doesn't matter where we go or what any of us do at any age along the way . . .we're going to meet people that we love and people that we decidedly do not like. That's just life and we do our best to enjoy and try to be sure that "we're not THE *one*" on that boat. (You know, as Wookie was saying . . ."there's one on every boat and if you don't know who that is, it's probably you!")
Oops, look at that . . .I just rambled on as old folk tend to do.
