MechDiver:
The "merit" of a certification is to the holder of the cert. If the card is meaningful to them, then it has merit. Whether is is meaningful to anyone else is irrelevant. The value of a cert may be different things to different people. The charter boat captain lets someone dive because they have an AOW card. Thus the card has "value" to that captain. As has been stated, the c-card means a certain criteria was met on a certain day by a certain individual. Thats all. It does not affect the merit or value of the card.
I have a number of c-cards. Some were hard, some were easy. All were worked for and earned. Some have merit (to me), all have value. Whether 99% of the posters on this board agree with the value of those certs is totally irrelevant to me.
Well put. Agree entirely.
Y'know, folks, if I walk into a computer store/car salesroom/clothes shop and ask about something and all the geezers there do is badmouth the rival product, whilst perhaps being a bit hypocritical about their own at the same time, I'm going to walk away and stay away ... I'm like that.
Doesn't matter if it's diving and PADI, NAUI, TDI, IANTD, GUE or whatever either. Except it's never happened to me in PADI/TDI/IANTD places ...
Now, to be absolutetly frank, my first OW instructor was a cross-over from NAUI who emphasized some rescue skills and a slow descent from the start, and perhaps because of this I've always held NAUI in very high regard, always aiming at some stage to do some course with the organization.
Now, on this forum, there are a lot of angry-young-men-type (and some not so young) NAUI people who may be perfectly fine instructors, in fact I think some of them definitely are (!), but who come across almost uniformly as terrifically narrow-minded, bigoted and sometimes, just plain careless with their facts.
Perhaps some food for thought for you instructors out there. In all seriousness and with due respect.