I recently dived with two other people pretty far back into the jungle in Mexico. We had all our gear, including double tanks, in two tiny rental cars. The road was so bad I had to walk about 1/3 of the way to keep the car from bottoming out, and it took well over an hour to get to the site. We were all geared up and heading into the jungle when my high pressure hose blew, almost deafening me. It would take too long for me to drive back to the shop and get a new hose, so I sat around in the jungle waiting for the others to complete their dives. While I was waiting, a couple diving the same cave emerged, and the husband was very surprised that I did not do the dive without the SPG. I did have a plug, so I could have stopped up the hole and relied on my knowledge of how fast I go through gas and the fact that we normally come back with more than we needed.
I would not do that, though. I have done dives where my consumption rate was surprisingly different from my expectations--in both directions. Two friends of mine recently turned a dive they had been planning for months largely because they realized they were both going through gas at a much higher rate than expected. Two other friends got bent because, having been trained to trust the "computer between their ears" rather than a mechanical one on the wrist, they did not realize the three different math errors they made on the dive until they downloaded the dive log from the computer on the wrist--which was in gauge mode as per agency dictates.
Even if I thought I could do the dive without an SPG, I would not impose that on my dive buddies. I would not ask them to compromise their values to help me get in a dive I could do another day.
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