I find it very interesting to read a thread where someone with a great deal of experience now, looks back and says they did not deserve their c card after open water.
While I agree that you are the best person to make that determination, I also think that your current training level skews your thinking.
I am a newly certified diver, trained by a very experienced instructor and was lucky to have a very small class. There were only three of us that started the training and one of them had trouble clearing their ears in the pool work and dropped out to take a one on one class.
The training organization was PADI and we were required to have gone through all of the reading material, answer all of the knowledge reviews and watch the videos prior to the first day of class. This left most of our time each night of training for work in the pool. The pool work is where it was discovered that the one student could not keep up, so it was just another student and myself. This was very good in many ways, but also a larger class would expose you to more students who in the future, could become dive buddies.
Our certification dives were performed in cold water, low visibility conditions in Monterey in March. We had to contend with surf entries, surface swims and surge.
I felt quite confident to be able to return to these same conditions and dive some rec dives with this level of training. The LDS where I was trained, had a diver social the following month and I was able to get three more dives in with two different divemasters. That also helped a lot!
I have a friend who was certified in Oregon at the same time in even worse conditions. We had planned to dive together after our training and we went back to monterey to dive on our own. We tried to be very good dive buddies and did our checks both above water and below. making sure we kept close, knew where each of us were on air and made simple dive plans and dove the plans. We did 3 dives that weekend and did not do a fourth because she did get too cold at Point Lobos and we aborted that dive to get her core warmed back up.
All in all, a very successful dive weekend for two newly certified divers.
I have since completed another 10 dives in the same conditions and will be heading to Cozumel for a short 5 day dive vacation where I will get to experience my first warm water drift diving.
At that point when I return, I should have over 30 dives and will now feel like I am ready to take my AOW, which as suggested above, will be with a different instructor.
My only regret to the whole adventure is that I waited until I was 53 to start!
Keith