With that many dives and that much training, they can do 10 minutes of deco on a dive above 130 feet in depth. Is that your definition of an awesome technical diver?
John, I believe there is no substitute for expirience and I believe that you can train them until the cows come home but when something goes wrong and they get scared or panik, someone with 150 dives is IMHO more likely to keep his %&$# together than someone that just has 40 dives with the same training.
A training situation will always feel much safer to the student than an actual free flow, cramp or busted hose or stuff like that. I think it's an important part of becoming a good diver that 'stuff' happens to you in real life. I would want the student to experience a free flow or kicked off mask while their still doing rec dives with no deco obligation.
Now, the more rec dives they do, the more likely it is that something happens to them in a relatively safe situation. These are very valuable experiences for a diver, but when you train them for 'bigger' dives that early they have had less chances to gain experiences on their own without the instructor.
You're right when you say 10 min max deco and 40m max depth is not a 'big' dive but from the point of view of someone with 30 or 50 dives, 40m is pretty deep and 10 min can be a very long time. Think cave diving, imagine someone gets scared, 10 min back to OW can be a very long time, too long.
I have seen a bunch of people get scared during a dive and seen a few people panic that weren't inexperienced but cracked under 'pressure' because they bit off too much. The only thing IMHO you can do to avoid this is diving, diving and more diving. Sure you need proper training but it only gives you direction, everybody has get dives under their belt, there is no way around it.
Unfortunately there have already been a bunch of fatal accidents this year in Germany and most happend because people paniked in 'deeper' water but less then 40m and most of time no deco... now, I don't know this for a fact but odds are they were diving deeper than they should have.
I think that people should take little steps in diving. I just don't see the upside in encouraging people to seek deco/deep training when they just started the sport. Now, there is no magic number but if I had to set one I'd be closer to 100 than to 25 and I don't see why that would be bad, it would be safer. I know that this is never going to happen because people what to use that stage (I agree, it looks cool) and wanna be tec divers (I agree, it sounds cool) and if TDI would up their standards, the people just take PADI courses.
To the people for the dives mean %&$#: The fraction of divers that suck at 200 dives is super tiny compared to the people that suck at 30 dives... the difference is astronomical! At the dive shops I worked at, my co-worker and I would automatically assume that people are horrible divers when they had a log book with less than 50 dives. At 20 dive, no instructor I know would expect any kind of skill from you. Obviously that is only a starting point and you have to see how they really are. In some cases you can even guess pretty accurately how bad they are depending on where the were trained... in my experience, OWD that got trained in Koh Tao or Cairns are the worst.
I am not putting anyone down... who is a good driver, snow boarder or anything after 50 or even 100 hours... lots of practice is what makes you good, courses 'only' refine your skills.
---------- Post added July 20th, 2015 at 12:49 AM ----------
Maybe there's an English-as-second-language issue here? No one is saying that experience doesn't matter. What we're saying is that dive count does not guarantee competence.
No, Saye said several times in this thread the number of dives mean %&$#. Dives are experience. How it is possible that you know many divers that are better at 20 dives than people you know at 200 dives I find just weird. That's not what I have seen. The 200 dive people are almost always better than the once with 20 dives.
