And today Andrew G has his own agency and can use his own terms however he sees fit.
I have certification cards from that agency that say "Introduction to Technical Diving," "Technical Diver I," and "Technical Diver II." A friend of mine has just started instructing for them, but she is only certified to teach certain courses in their "recreational" program (their term).
Now, I did hear another instructor from his agency say they want to blur the lies between technical diving and recreational diving, but Andrew is still using those terms.
AG was pushing a different meme back then, one which was not as perverted by marketing.
The "all diving is technical diving" meme meant that all the skills and attitude and training were applicable to open water diving. You still needed good buoyancy control, trim, efficient fin kicks, gas management, redundancy and failure analysis of your gear, and training to deal with emergencies and safely ascend.
That meme led me down the road of taking fundies when I had about 25 dives, just doing it because I wanted better training than PADI OW1, just doing it because I wanted to be a better diver, not because I wanted to be a technical/cave diver.
It seems like that idea has gotten a bit perverted now, where its no longer about building up a recreational diver to make them a competent diver through the use of the same tools as technical divers -- but its more about accelerating recreational divers into technical gear and making the profit off of the gear.
[ And I'm not sure exactly where that meme went. I've been noticing its absence lately. One thing is that GI3 isn't around yelling about how all the fundamental skills in DIR diving are simply straight out of the PADI OW1 manual, that if we'd just actually applied, then everyone would be diving DIR anyway. Another thing is that there seems to be a bit of a push from the technical side to institute even more of a divide between recreational and technical diving in order to make technical diving more "eleet". All of this has eroded the idea that the lines between tech and rec should be blurrier, but more so because the rec standards need to come up. ]