Wow! That was a rant and a half. Hard to understand most of it, but I get the point that you are upset. Jetfins have some very loyal customers.
Maybe I am elitist; but how is that a bad thing, especially when the bar for normal is set to a standard that is 50 years old? Try to imagine Boeing still building the 707 and the competition not trying to make anything better than that. The airlines would not have put up with it and found someone who could do better. That hasn't really happened in the scuba industry. Why is that?
Should the Air Force still be flying F-4s? It was state of the art 50 years ago. Were the creators of the F-22 at the Pentagon and Lockheed simply being elitist to demand something better from the F-22? No! Competition forced them to demand better. It's a situation of excel or perish in that business. That level of competition is missing in the scuba industry. Is this lack of competition because of the customers, the manufacturers, the training agencies, or all the above? Is it something else entirely?
When I talk to divers, it seems many of them can't imagine something any better than what they have. Even after getting slammed and abused by relatively normal and common 2 knot ocean currents on a dive, the situation of diver mobility is perceived to be just fine even though they can't swim any faster than 1.5 knots in a sprint. Why is this situation considered okay? These things don't make sense to me.
Personally, I want something better than the status quo and I've been trying to do something about it. If that makes me elitist, I guess I'm okay with it. I'm not going to change my opinion simply because someone got upset and went on a rant because I don't think Jetfins are the best things ever made. Jetfins hurt my feet and don't perform as well for me as other fins I have available to use.
Before getting overly defensive about Jetfins, diver mobility is not really even a fin issue. Diver mobility is a diver issue. Fins are a part of that, but it is a system level problem. Magic fins that are 100% efficient would not make most divers as mobile as they should be to operate safely and with confidence in the ocean. Before looking at new fins, it is actually more important to tackle the issue of drag, because every pound of drag shed from the diver is a pound of thrust the fins don't need to generate. If a diver doesn't deal with the drag issue first, don't expect better fins to make a huge difference. It will have some impact, but probably not what you'd be expecting.
My latest scuba kit has only 15% the drag of typical recreational scuba kits using the same tank (standard AL80). My estimates for total diver drag are over 40% less than that of the average recreational scuba diver. With this level of drag reduction, the efficiency of the fins I'm using makes a very noticeable difference. With my home-made long fins, I can cruise efficiently at 2 knots. I speed limit at 2.5 knots because my regulator starts free-flowing heavily. My actual physical speed limit is 2.9 knots.
The biggest benefit of all this is that when most divers are tapped out at 1 knot for a long range cruise, my breathing rate is the same as it is when I'm sitting on the bottom not moving at all. If the currents pick up and I need to be able to move quickly, I can do it without burning through my tank supply or building up dangerous levels CO2 in my bloodstream, and my feet never hurt. I prefer this to "normal" diving.
The second benefit is that I can swim with dolphins and other large ocean animals without getting left behind. This is something normal scuba divers don't get to do unless they ditch the tanks and freedive, or just surface swim. (Skip forward to 2 minutes if the "start at time" function isn't working.)
I am elite. But, I have a hard time understanding why this was not made normal a long time ago.
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