The advantage of diving in clubs "along the line" (meant both physically and as a parabola to 'respecting their rules') is that you can better drill your technique, skills, performance and endurance. It is certainly more fun diving just for pleasure, but that's usually not what you expect from the club training, and it is more difficult to progress in that way.
I use to freedive for pleasure since more than 20 years, but started to attend the apnea club training only a year ago. My main motivation was the attempt to find a sportive activity that would help keeping myself fit, that would boost the capacity in my most favorite summer activity - snorkeling/freediving, and also for social reasons (I live in a foreign country, working home, so the opportunity to meet people is reduced).
I do not find the two styles of freediving conflicting - the diving down the rope with other club members helps you to drill your stile, technique, awareness, and bottom time, while keeping your security on a good level, but still it is no replacement for recreational deep snorkeling/freediving, where the main objective is the fun, exploration of the bottom, observation of the environment, and the pure pleasure of being free in a completely different world - by submerging my head I completely forget everything else.
In the club, during the winter we were just drilling the dynamics and statics in the pool, but recently we did some training in a quarry, and I can tell that although I always considered the pure freediving along a rope for boring and uninteresting, I enjoyed it as much as exploratory deep snorkeling on a riff.
