I know this is a bit of a side-bar but I would like to offer my opinion on this.
To me, kneeling or not kneeling during OW training has several aspects that are important.
incorrect positioning
Kneeling causes the diver to be in the incorrect position to learn a certain number of skills. Chief among those are mask clearing and AAS usage. As a certified diver you seldom clear your mask while vertical in the water column and you will probably never initiate an OOA situation while sitting stationary on the bottom in a vertical position.
This is about what I call "specificity of training". In order to train most efficiently you need to train the way you will be diving. Namely, while swimming around. Every skill taught and practiced in the context in which students will ACTUALLY be diving pays dividends in the end result.
buoyancy control
Learning buoyancy control takes time. In the OW course students don't have excessive amounts of time. There are a few instructors out there who spend up to 50 hours in confined with students but most of the diving courses include more like 5-10 hours in confined. Teaching buoyancy control in that amount of time requires a very efficient approach. Every second the student is stationary on the bottom and waiting for something to happen is time wasted that could and should be put to better use.
Moreover, issues related to buoyancy control are strongly implicated in turning incidents into accidents. This isn't just a matter of something being "better" and that the student will eventually learn it after they are certified. This is a verifiable safety issue that needs to be taken seriously.
bootstrapping
Future instructors are learning today. If we expect training in the future to be better than the training we got (not all of which was horrible but some of which was highly inefficient) then we need to set expectations early. I have the entire Jacques Cousteau DVD collection and when you look at their diving it is ... frankly ... abysmal by today's expectations. My sincere hope is that my students will look back at their training and appreciate the bar we set for them as having offered a good foundation for solid diving and that they didn't need to learn it "on the fly" after being certified.
efficiency
I've mentioned this word a couple of times already but this is the crux if the new approach. We don't have a lot of time to train newbie divers and wasting that time doing things inefficiently is what separates good instructors from bad ones, good courses from bad ones, good results from the bad, good divers from the ones we all complain about. Making every minute count is important when you don't have a lot of minutes to work with. For example, my students NEVER kneel while they are waiting for something. They wait while hovering. That's not for my ego. It's so that they are using that time "waiting" to practice a skill that they actually will need. It's all about making every minute count.
finally
Finally, I have to say that as an instructor you have your eyes focused on the end result. That result is a process. In that process there will be times that students will touch the bottom. Maybe they will even kneel on the bottom. That's not a big problem as long as whatever they are doing in that process serves to achieve the best end result possible. Going too far with "never touching the bottom" can actually work against that result by spending time on things too early or in the wrong order, which can distract the instructor from the end-result. We've been seeing this happening in recent years too with instructors who started out well but now have to spend inordinate amounts of time in confined because they are taking steps that are far too big early in training and need all of that time to fix their mistakes.
The point here being that training neutrally buoyant isn't a goal in and of itself. It must serve the goal of making training more efficient.
R..
