If you have the time, and you are willing to spend the money, you can come out of an AOW class very prepared for a whole lot of Florida Open Water Advanced diving.
There are instructors that can educate you thoroughly out there, but they are the minority.
The big issue is that the business is overwhelmingly structured to allow most AOW students and cert holders to get their ticket punched for $250-$400 and go to those deeper dive sites.
This does not upset me, that's just the way the business must behave nowadays in order to survive.
In my not at all humble opinion, the class work (I was breaking down equations for Martini's Law, Dalton's Law, Boyle's Law, and Charles' Law at the age of 12) pool sessions (we swam laps for about 1/2 hour at the end of evey class for cripes sake) was so much harder in 1977.
It was a newer sport back then, the gear was not nearly as good as it is now as a whole.
I can state that for me, none of my training since has equaled that experience.
It was TOUGH!
OK, I was a punkie little 12 year old, but I had been in the water, read all the books, and was highly motivated to be a DIVER!
Most of the guys...yeah GUYS were former Navy divers and they were as a whole excellent teachers.
Not all of them though.
So, my advice is to just get some tips here, make some phone calls, be specific in finding a relic of a bygone age of an instructor, or one of their protoge's, and take the class.
Explain what kid of an AOW diver YOU want to be at the end of the class, and proceed accordingly.
BTW, I think that there are EXCELLENT dive instructors not too far from Orlando in Cave Country.
They are often people that got kinda' bored with the whole touristy "lookie-lookie a fishie" clientel, and have moved north to the land of the
he-man/woman divers up there with a real job, and like to instruct serious students on the side.
Chug
"Ohh...Lookie!!"
A fishey-fishey kinda-diver.