Thanks DevonDiver a lot for your time and effort to transfer your knowledge. The above statement though is plainly wrong. You don't know our diving style you just assume and this particular assumption is plainly wrong. You don't need to "routinely push NDL" to know that your computer is more conservative than others. And we didn't. Here is how I fount out:
As the newest diver of the group (it was my first ever dive vacation - the fellow divers were much more experienced) I was a bit too cautious. Hence, I did notice that while I was getting near NDL everybody else was relaxed, especially during the last dive of the day. Based on that I did discuss it with them and compared times. You don't need to be near or on the NDL to do that. At any moment of the last dive I'd see how much time they had compared to mine. And my computer was giving me consistently lower times. This happened more or less in all of the previous days on the last dive of each day. Based on that, and mainly to stick with the group, I mistakenly decided from the fourth day onward to relax a bit and stay near the NDL a bit more with the known results.
Congratulations to you for posting this story, and by posting in a public forum, opening yourself up to criticism. But unfortunately, I think that you are more interested in "winning" the argument by coming up with an explanation that supports what you did, than you are with learning. And that's not good.
First of all, it is absolutely possible to get an "unexplained" hit. I had one. I did a chamber ride and stayed within NDLs. So if you think that if you had just gotten a more liberal computer then the magic bracelet would keep you safe, you are simply wrong.
More important is what Andy has been telling you. This discussion should have absolutely nothing to do with algorithms, nitrox, or "diving styles". It should be about understanding the basic idea behind computer diving. That idea is that while there are a lot of variables that the algorithm doesn’t account for (hydration, age, fitness, right to left shunts, etc..), it does track depth and time incredibly precisely. It makes calculations based on more data than you can ever hope to correctly guesstimate, especially after several days of frequent diving. The algorithms are very complex - it's not just like a liberal computer just does the same calculation as a conservative one, and then takes 10 minutes off of your NDL.
If you are going to dive a computer and it tells you that you have a deco obligation, you need to do that deco obligation. If you are lucky, you will have enough gas for that, since you didn’t plan to go into deco. If you don’t like that idea, then dive tables and square profiles. But if you want to take advantage of the “credit” that you get for time above maximum depth, then that’s the tradeoff.
You can get as many people here as you like to back you up, but it doesn’t change this fact: surfacing with an alarming computer that you “fix” by having the DM descend and clear the obligation, and then diving again, is simply terrible diving practice. I have no interest in looking at your profiles, because that misses the entire point. You don’t dive by constantly looking at spreadsheets of your last 6 dives and figuring out how you can be more clever than the dive computer. It’s not a legal case, where you can find some loophole that gets you out of jail.
I’m taking the time to write this not just for you, but for any other new divers reading this thread. Yes, you didn’t get bent - that’s great. But eventually, if you do things like ascend without clearing what the algorithm says is your deco obligation (taking into account ALL of details of ALL of your recent profiles), you may eventually draw the short straw.
