The PADI Advanced diver certification

Does anyone really seriously believe a diver can not only be awarded an entry-level certification in three days, but a further five dives in two days allows them to be considered an advanced diver?

Apparently PADI, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors does. An advanced diver in less than a week with less than 10 dives logged, all training dives too. But what does this really mean? What do you learn on a PADI advanced diver course to make you an advanced diver? The navigation dive is good, no qualms about that, one dive won't give you excellent navigation skills, it does introduce the diver to the compass in more detail, navigating a square using distance estimation underwater although I have never used fin strokes in a dive to navigate.

The deep dive is pretty worthless in its current form, anything deeper than 18 metres and no deeper than 30 metres, underwater tasks are more for giving you something to do so you can sell the course as a training dive. Most of the other dives don't even require in-water or direct supervision. Is a boat dive, underwater photographer dive, fish ID dive, underwater naturalist dive, digital underwater photographer dive, multi-level dive an advanced training dive, the list goes on.

You are only performing only five dives needing a minimum time of 20 minutes per dive and only needing to exceed a depth of 5 metres (with the exception of the deep dive) to log the dive. This is purely a course for dive centres to sell courses to newly certified divers, PADI sells course materials and the certification fee allowing instructors to sell further marginal specialty diver courses. That's about it.