You are ignoring the arguments given to you. With respect to kneeling, several posters, including myself, gave a very simple argument - students don't sign up for this class to either demonstrate their buoyancy and trim skills, or perfect their buoyancy and trim skills. In the same vein, the instructor doesn't want to lose valuable bottom time on perfecting buoyancy skills of the least skilled student at everyone else's expense. Why is it so difficult to understand, or at least acknowledge?
Is that really the only argument? It doesn't matter? We are talking about a class that involves deep penetration into slowly collapsing large steel coffins. Many people have died in these environments because they lacked these basic skills. I am being a little facetious, but with that kind of logic let's do away with any class prerequisites and start taking new divers to 200'. Basics don't matter, they paid to learn the 200' stuff.
Please stop saying that they are demonstrating "poor skills", or "bad stuff", it's just not true. They may not be demonstrating perfect neutral buoyancy and horizontal trim at that very moment, but that doesn't mean they are demonstrating poor skills or are not held to a high enough standard.
I laughed at 'that very moment' comment---that's being a little deceptive to people who haven't seen the video. It did get me thinking a little bit though. I have focused on the kneeling during the bottle drop--mostly because it was blatantly obvious and also I wanted to focus the conversation on one particular instance so that we didn't get diluted with tic for tat in an 80 min video. If you were to put "skills" and "stuff" into three categories - poor, average, and good. What would each category entail. What are some of the factors that would be poor bottle drop skill, average bottle drop skill, or good average drop skill.
There are people in here that are denying what we saw was poor bottle drop/pickup skills. What does poor bottle drop/pick up skills mean to you?
Aren’t all instructional dives trust me dives? Even in an overhead environment? What if you had an issue 1000’ in a hole with two or four students??
This is a very valid point. In a cave, if something happened to the an instructor the students would be on their own just as in this wreck. I think the 'trust me' comment comes when the OP states that he would not do this dive soon after class by himself/without the instructor. If a person takes a class, and passes the class they should be comfortable doing all of the dives that they did to earn the certification without the instructor present. The fact that OP says he wouldn't repeat this same dive the next day after class is a little bit of a red flag.--------I have a feeling that people are really going to dig into the last few sentences and start throwing what-ifs, and scenarios, I get that. Take it in the general spirit in which it was meant and think about things outside of scuba. If someone won't do something without direct supervision can you honestly state that they are competent, skilled, able, confident---whatever word you want to use in XYZ?
You don’t seem to get the “it doesn’t matter” portion that others see. Kneeling at anytime falls outside GUE/DIR holy grail, I get it.
I’m just surprised you admitted you’d hold onto a rock if you were winded - don’t come down here and do that though - you should take the drift diving specialty and learn how to dive in currents.
To each his own.
The great irony of this is that rddvet doesn't possess as single GUE card. There was good diving before GUE existed and there is good diving outside of GUE. You have been told numerous times in this thread by many divers, some with GUE training others with no GUE training, that no diver is perfect and that kneeling, breaking trim, etc is acceptable at different points in a dive or for specific purposes.
You can't accept that GUE has become a much more inclusive and accepting place that strives to balance real-world practicalities and good diving skill. You force yourself to fight a 2000's caricature of a GUE diver because admitting that GUE has moved more towards the middle would be exposing just how far off base you are tilting.