People make decisions day in and day out about what equipment to take to avoid something as serious as not having air to breathe?
You are much more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident than from running out of air on scuba. On the surface, that makes choosing which car to drive a much more serious situation.
Going below the surface, I simply don't see the different choices as being that big a deal, and it makes the automobile analogy apt. I am not so feeble minded that I cannot deal with configuration changes in my scuba gear, just as I am not so feeble minded that I can't deal with changes in different kinds of motor vehicles.
Putting analogies aside, would you mind sharing how many years you spent with the standardization philosophy before you left it in favor of making gear decisions that the agency didn't provide for? Got a particular anecdote about when the light bulb went off?
I began taking tech training through the shop where I was employed, and it was TDI in name only; the instructor's TDI instructor training had come from an employee of Extreme Exposure (home of GUE), and he told us we would be ignoring TDI standards and following GUE's in the program. (Interestingly enough, TDI was just fine with that when I asked them about it.)
When GUE exile Andrew Georgitsis formed UTD, our instructor was one of the first to cross over, and our TDI student group all became UTD students. There was very little different from our original TDI/GUE training, but we had to start over at UTD Intro to Tech. I frankly battled UTD leadership regularly over things that my own research had shown were at least questionable. I always lost. After a couple years, I was a UTD Tech 2 diver when I made the momentous decision to switch back to TDI, getting Advanced Trimix certified in Florida. That was a huge decision--I knew getting certified in a tech program outside of the shop where I was employed meant I could no longer work for that shop. I was very happy working for that shop, so that indicates how strongly I felt the need to change.
Before I did that, I had gotten cave certified through NSS-CDS, and when I asked about configurations, my instructor said I could do whatever I wanted within reason, provided I could explain why. In time, we discussed some of the things I had been taught, and he shook his head in bewilderment. Why do it that way? I honestly did not know. It was because I was told that I must do it that way. "Dogma!" he said in disgust. "Dogma!"
When I switched back to TDI, I ran into more of the same. I learned that I preferred doing some things differently from the way I had been absolutely, positively required to do it before. This included procedures when I became a TDI instructor. When I did my practice teaching, my Instructor trainers wondered why I taught some things the way I did. The only thing I could tell them was that was how I had been told things MUST be done.
As a tech instructor, I have made understanding why things are the way they are a key facet of instruction. For example, my students are required to read a variety of sources on decompression theory and come to a decision on what decompression algorithm they want to use, and they have to explain why they chose it over the others.
When I later became a PADI trimix instructor, I ran into an interesting problem. Several of my fellow students from our UTD group came to me and wanted me to certify them for trimix diving. (They had been at the same level as me years before when we were students together.) PADI has a chart that shows at what level divers from different agencies could crossover for PADI tech, but the chart did not include UTD. PADI had to research the agency to determine at what level the former UTD students could cross over. It turned out to be surprisingly low, and the primary reason that was explained to me was that former UTD students need to learn to make their own decisions on things.
While on a cave diving trip, I listened to a DIR diver telling another DIR diver about a disconcerting conversation he had had with someone once associated with DIR but who was now diving with a number of practices that did not conform to DIR standardization. He said that this now non-standardized diver said he had made the changes because he liked them better. But what about standardization? In describing the man's reply, he made a crude gesture, indicating that the man did not give a rat's ass about that. That man's name is Bill Hogarth Main. You may have heard of him.