Would advanced courses make sense for me?
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yes, you can do all the skills needed for cavern in open water. Then you have daylight, so it makes it all easier. But the skills are most times not teached in any open water speciality. Only in an overhead specialty like cavern or wreck. Normally cavern courses start with an open water session to practise skills.
But again, you cannot dive in the cenotes in mexico without a guide as you only have a cavern card. And if you don't have one, you can do the same recreational dives with a guide. Only with intro to cave or higher you can go on your own. In other places like France you can dive in caves without any cert. So this makes the cavern cert not very usefull in things like 'allowed to do more in diving'. The learned skills from cavern or intro to cave are also very usefull when doing wreck penetrations (are more or less the same). So for this a cavern course can be usefull. But laying a line as customer on a guided dive, I have never seen this. So if you future is only guided diving, you will probably never use the skill again. And if you only dive guided, probably there is no time to practise it again after a course so you stay confident with the skill.
But if you think about a cavern class, don't take it with every instructor. You really have to learn the skills right. Take cavern from a real full cave instructor or avid cave diver, not from someone who only can teach the specialty and never dive in caves.
But if you want to go to the intro to cave path, probably some new equipment is also needed, and you need to know how to use it. Intro to cave can be the first step and skip cavern if you want to do cave diving. But then it is for experienced divers who really want to step in the technical diving world.
But again from what I already wrote, more and more courses are adviced to the topic starter, but maybe not needed for this type of diver. With 70 cards you have spent a lot of money (many thanks will say the divecenter and the diveindustry), but probably only 2 or 3 cards are really used.
I'm not sure of this question, but a Cavern Class is mostly skills and a lot of buoyance and control like backwards kicking. Noting at all like cave diving.
Learner Diver
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I am guessing a cavern class was suggested because of the skills involved. Those depend on a degree upon the instructor. For example, backward kicking is not a normal part of most cavern diving courses.
You can get an instructor to teach many of those skills anywhere, as long as it is the right instructor. Most normal open water instructors do not have any training themselves in advanced kicking techniques and the kind of buoyancy needed for cave diving. If you find an instructor who is also a solid technical diver, those skills can be taught in a stand alone class.
A friend and I separately developed such a class as a workshop, and we shared our thoughts. He got legal advice that it should be made into an agency-approved course to provide liability protection, and we did that. I have since learned that many other people trained in technical diving, including cave diving, have done the same thing. So such courses exist under a variety of names.
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